Health Aid, Women's Empowerment, and Infant Mortality

• In Event: International Political Economy of Aid

Abstract

The longstanding debate on whether foreign aid promotes development suggests that aid’s efficacy depends on conditions in recipient states. Advocates of gender equality argue that empowering women is desirable not only in its own right but also as a means to other sought-after outcomes. We bring together these issues and argue that women’s political empowerment in aid-receiving countries enhances the effect of health aid on child health outcomes. To examine the issue, we employ a recently compiled dataset on members of government across time and countries (Nyrup and Bramwell (2020) and aid for health from the Creditor Reporting System (CRS) of the OECD. With a sample of up to 99 developing countries from 1973-2019, we employ a two-way panel fixed effects estimation method and augment it with linear and non-linear country-specific trends. This type of augmentation is an underexplored yet a simple way to introduce more rigor to cross-country analyses using two-way panel fixed effects estimations. Our results indicate that health aid is associated with greater reductions in infant mortality in countries with larger shares of women cabinet ministers. These results are robust to estimations considering confounding factors hypothesized as conditioning the effect of aid, such as regime type, quality of government and public health spending, and alternative explanations such as recipient countries’ expectation of future aid, the aid dependency of the recipient countries, and non-health related aid. Our work has implications for research on aid effectiveness, the consequences of gender equality, and the politics of presence.

Authors

• Gabriella R. Montinola, University of California, Davis

• Anna Minasyan, University of Groningen

• Sarah Prince, UC Davis