Replication data for: The Impact of Politically Motivated Foreign Aid: What is the Evidence?

This paper contributes to the literature on aid and politico-economic development. Several articles have suggested that foreign aid harms growth and political freedoms in recipient countries, particularly when aid is politically motivated. The impact of foreign aid on the United Nations Security Council temporary members is a prime test case, as it is frequently claimed that such aid is politically motivated due to the geopolitical interests of the permanent members and the necessity of building majority coalitions for important Security Council votes. This paper uses instrumental variables and coarsened exact matching to assess the causal impact of foreign aid on GDP growth and democratization in temporary members from 1946 to 2005. We check for robustness by running our specifications on multiply imputed data and conducting K-fold cross validation of our model. Contrary to the recent literature, we find no support for the alleged pernicious effects of aid on growth and political freedoms. In fact, aid substantively increases both GDP growth and democracy scores in temporary members.