Foreign Aid’s Motivations: Theoretical Arguments and Empirical Evidence

Why do countries spend economic (material and non-material) resources on the well-being of non-citizens outside their borders? How can we account for the main trends, regularities, and changes in development cooperation practices? These are all relevant questions for both theoretical and empirical reasons. Theoretically, the international political economy literature in the field of International Relations (IR) is interested in understanding the dynamics behind countries’ economic relations, and foreign aid is part of that phenomenon. Empirically, having a clear theoretical idea about the motivations behind the provision of foreign aid is the basis for looking at empirical regularities that will provide evidence to support or reject these theories. The study of the intersection between foreign aid and the field of international relations is underdeveloped. Both areas are well-developed and have much to offer to each other. Foreign aid research can contribute to a better understanding of state’s multiple goals, both humanitarian and egoistic. Further, the IR field and its main schools of thought might help us shed light on aid patterns, trends, and decisions. Additionally, a distinction between an understanding the politics of foreign aid and its goals and outcomes arises when the IR field and foreign aid studies start to dialogue. This chapter first reviews the main explanations for state behaviour at the international level provided by the IR literature. Second, it distinguishes between four main sets of scholarly works that were developed to explain foreign aid. Third, it relates the IR literature to an underdeveloped area of study within IR: Foreign aid, its existence, and how its patterns can be explained. Finally, it points out to several methodological challenges in studying foreign aid from an IR perspective.