Working Papers
Kibria, A., Oladi, R. and R. Bosworth, 2019, "Political Economy of Aid Allocation: The Case of Arab Aid", R&R from The World Economy.
Abstract:
We develop a new theory of aid allocation, whereby a representative donor country's payoff depends on both the well-being of the representative recipient country as well as its political alignment with the donor. Our theoretical model suggests that there exists an increasing relationship between donor's aid allocation and the solidarity and geopolitical alignment of the recipient country. Our model also predicts that donors allocate more aid to recipient countries with higher levels of human capital. We test these predictions using a unique dataset on aid allocation by major Arab donors. After constructing a new measure of solidarity and geopolitical alignment for recipient countries by using principal component analysis, we employ this measure as well as other control variables in our empirical analysis. The results suggest that solidarity and geopolitical alignment, as well as the human capital of a recipient country, are the key determinants of aid allocation from the Arab donors.
Download paper: Arab_Aid_Ahsan_The Political Economy of International Organizations Conf.pdf
Presentation: Arab Aid PPT_Full_Ahsan.pdf Poster: Arab Aid Poster.pdf
Kibria, A., Akhundjanov, S.B. and Oladi, R., 2021, "Trading virus: Pandemics and economic globalization", under review.
Abstract:
The COVID-19 has crippled the world economy at an unprecedented level. While published economic literature is very scant, it is rapidly developing to address various aspects of COVID-19. This paper is a first attempt to study empirically the impact of economic globalization on the development of global pandemics using data on COVID-19. Our analysis supports our hypothesis that international economic connectedness is significant in the development of a global pandemic. In particular, we show that bilateral trade with China (as a proxy for international relationship) has a positive and statistically significant effect on the development of COVID-19 pandemic, after controlling for economic and healthcare controls. The results are robust to numerous alternative specifications, including the use of commercial service trade as our main explanatory variable. Our estimates indicate that the elasticity of COVID-19 confirmed cases with respect to total bilateral trade with China (total trade in commercial services) ranges between 0.37-0.77 (1.07-1.55, respectively).
Download paper: Trading Virus: Pandemics and Economic Globalization.pdf