Christopher Kilby

World Bank Independence: A Model and Statistical Analysis of US Influence

This paper develops a model to test whether World Bank lending caters to US interests. We use country-level panel data to examine the geographic distribution of World Bank lending to 110 countries from 1968 to 2002. After controlling for country characteristics expected to influence the distribution of lending in a manner consistent with the World Banks charter and stated allocation mechanisms, we introduce variables reflecting US interests. The empirical results are consistent with a significant US influence, but one which varies across presidential administrations. These findings have important implications because donor influence may reduce the credibility, and hence the development effectiveness, of multilateral aid organizations.

How Do Political Changes Influence US Bilateral Aid Allocations? Evidence from Panel Data

This paper examines the role of US domestic politics in aid allocation using panel data on 119 countries from 1960 to 1997. Employing proxies for four allocation criteria (development concerns, strategic importance, commercial importance, and democratization), we find evidence that each has influence, although the evidence is stronger for some criteria (development, commercial) than for others (strategic, democratization). Their influence depends on the composition of the US government. When the president and Congress are liberal, development concerns receive more weight than when the president and/or Congress are more conservative. When the Congress is more conservative, commercial concerns have more weight than when the Congress is liberal. These findings are important in light of current attempts to overhaul the allocation of aid.

Supervision and performance: the case of World Bank projects

This paper explores empirical aspects of the relation between supervision and project performance. I focus on development projects funded by the World Bank and on supervision done by the World Bank. The World Bank is the preeminent international development organization both in terms of money lent and leadership; furthermore, data measuring project performance and supervision are relatively comprehensive. The link between supervision and performance is of theoretical interest because it illuminates one side of World Bank-borrower interaction and of practical interest because supervision is an instrument controlled by the World Bank which may improve project performance. Data are from 1426 World Bank-funded projects completed between 1981 and 1991. Analysis of the influence of World Bank supervision on project performance uses annual supervision and annual interim performance ratings. The annual updating process which generates the discrete interim ratings is described by an ordered probit likelihood function. Maximum likelihood estimates indicate a positive impact of early supervision on performance; late supervision has significantly less influence. The estimation predicts that a significant and persistent increase in the level of supervision may lead to a gain of several percentage points in the economic rate of return. Because of the size of World Bank-funded projects, the potential gains from increasing supervision far outweigh the costs.

Foreign Aid and Domestic Politics: Voting in Congress and the Allocation of USAID Contracts across Congressional Districts

This paper investigates the relationship between congressional support for foreign aid and the distribution of United States Agency for International Development (USAID) contract spending across congressional districts within the United States. The extent to which such a relationship matters has become increasingly important in recent years, as the end of the Cold War and the advent of the Republican-controlled Congress have eroded the traditional base of support for foreign aid. We develop a model to illustrate how the distribution of contract spending could be used to increase support for foreign aid, but at the expense of development impact, in effect trading quality for quantity. Data on domestic foreign aid contract spending and votes in the 104th Congress House of Representatives allow us to test whether the geographic distribution of USAID contract spending within the United States is consistent with a systematic attempt to build support for foreign aid in Congress. Econometric results provide little evidence of such attempts, apparently because voting on this issue is insensitive to the distribution of contract spending.

Reassessing the Role of Constituency in Congressional Voting

Poole and Rosenthal (1997) argue that mostcongressional voting can be understood in terms of alow-dimensional spatial model. This paper uses their model toassess the importance of the two mechanisms that couldcontribute to the vote-predicting power of constituencyvariables: (i) constituency variables may predict wherelegislators fall along one or two dimensions in thevote-predicting spatial model and (ii) constituency variablesmay account for errors in the spatial models predictions. Thepaper compares different methods of using a basicset of constituency variables to generate out-of-sample predictionsfor representatives votes. The analysis covers a large numberof recent House roll call votes, considering Democrats andRepublicans separately and using Poole and RosenthalsW-NOMINATE scores to measure legislators locations invote-predicting space. The results show that the predictivepower of a basic set of constituency variables arisesprincipally from its ability to predict representativeslocations in Poole and Rosenthals space, not from its abilityto explain errors in the predictions based on that space. Thisholds true to a remarkable extent, consistent with Poole andRosenthals argument that the influence of constituentinterests occurs largely through logrolling mechanismsreflected in their spatial model.