Replication data for: United States Economic Aid and Repression: The Opportunity Cost Argument. The Journal of Politics / Volume 70 / Issue 02 / April 2008, pp 513-526

The United States explicitly ties its foreign economic aid to respect for human rights by recipient countries. The United States is also the world's largest aid donor. It is therefore surprising that no link has been established between U.S. economic aid and greater respect for human rights abroad. I change this by arguing that U.S. aid policies do affect human rights records but in an indirect way. Repressive leaders foregoing substantial amounts of U.S. aid because of their human rights policies are also the leaders most likely to increase their respect for human rights in the future. I calculate the opportunity costs of human rights abuse, in part, by estimating a two-stage model with selection that simultaneously assesses the decision to grant aid and the amount of aid disbursed to each country. By modeling the process this way, I am able to demonstrate that human rights concerns affect only the decision to grant aid; need determines the amount of aid given after recipients are selected. I then use predicted aid amounts from the selection model to determine the likelihood and amount of aid for each country-year that was not selected to receive aid. These estimated opportunity costs correlate strongly with increases in human rights for “partly free” states.

美国明确将其对外经济援助与受援国的人权尊重状况挂钩。同时，美国亦是全球最大的援助捐赠国。令人颇感意外的是，学界尚未证实美国经济援助与受援国人权状况改善之间存在关联。本研究旨在填补这一研究空白，提出美国的援助政策确实会对受援国的人权记录产生影响，只不过这种影响是间接的。那些因自身人权政策而放弃大量美国对外援助的威权领导人，恰恰也是未来最有可能改善本国人权尊重状况的领导人。本研究部分通过构建带选择项的两阶段模型，测算侵犯人权行为的机会成本——该模型可同时评估美国对外援助的拨付决策，以及向每个受援国实际拨付的援助金额。通过该建模框架，本研究得以证实：人权关切仅会影响美国的援助拨付决策，而援助金额的多寡则由受援国入选后的实际需求决定。随后，本研究利用选择模型得出的援助预测金额，为所有未获得援助资格的国家-年度样本测算其获得援助的可能性与对应援助规模。测算得到的机会成本，与“半自由”国家的人权状况改善呈现显著正相关。