New face of development assistance: public goods and changing ethics

Abstract

This article indicates the policy implications of the increasing emphasis of public goods in foreign assistance. Even the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) reflect this public good emphasis. This changing composition of aid has important ethical implications: public good aid is driven by altruism and self-interest owing to benefit spillovers to donor nations. We show how key properties of publicness influence not only the desired direction of income transfers, but also the identity of the appropriate donor (i.e. donor nation, multilateral agency, or charitable foundation). The article also highlights how the spatial spillovers of public goods affect aid decisions. Finally, we relate five essential sectors to their public good properties and policy implications. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Networked innovation and coalition formation: the effect of group-based social preferences

“…13 In Sandler and Arce (2007), such impure public good production is set in the context of international development cooperation. Here, donor countries can also derive private benefits -e.g.…”

Less Pretension, More Ambition : Development Policy in Times of Globalization

“…Furthermore, because donors focus on countries and 'ownership', there is a risk that both recipient countries and donors consider regional public goods to be less interesting than global or national goods. It can therefore be necessary to devise creative solutions, if there is no regional entity that can contract or provide security for loans for regional public goods, for example in cooperation with regional development banks and joint ventures between countries (Birdsall 2006;Estevadeordal et al 2002;Kanbur 2001;Sandler 2005Sandler , 2007unido 2008).…”

Responses to global challenges: trends in aid‐financed global public goods

“…In the case of summation technology GPGs a neutrality theorem applies (Warr, ; Cornes and Sandler, ) and the level of public good provision is indifferent to any change in income distribution among contributors. Neutrality is not relevant, when income comes from new contributors, such as charitable foundations or NGOs (Sandler and Arce, ). On the contrary, distribution matters and redistribution can be Pareto improving, when the provision technology is not of a summation kind (Jayaraman and Kanbur, ; Lei et al.…”

“… A less strict aggregation technology is the weaker‐link technology , which allows for the influence of second, third and so on smallest contributions. This is the case with curbing the spread of invasive pest species, because actions beyond the smallest can provide additional protection (Sandler and Arce, ). …”