U.S Disaster Relief Aid Flows: Do Political and Economic Factors Matter?

Introduction In the 2015 calendar year, the Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA) provided an estimated $780 million in relief aid to countries stricken by natural disasters, responding to 27 emergencies such as earthquakes, floods, and droughts (OFDA, 2015; OFDA, 2016). While these numbers are certainly not insignificant, a quick search of the EM-DAT database compiled by The Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters provides a list of 365 natural disasters occurring across the world, excluding the United States, in 2015 alone1 (Guha-Sapir et al., 2016). Thus, there are 338 documented instances in which a country affected by a natural disaster in 2015 did not receive relief aid from the OFDA branch of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).2 For example, a flood in the African country of Ghana that affected 5,000 people received no funding from USAID, while a cyclone in Kiribati affecting 1,500 people (according to EM-DAT) received $50,000 of USAID support (Guha-Sapir et al., 2016; OFDA, 2015, p. 72). Why did Kiribati, rather than Ghana, draw aid? What differentiates the select 27 disasters from the remaining 338? More generally, what determines the varying amounts of United States government resources that are devoted to international natural disaster relief in different locations and why? To begin, it is useful to say a bit about why I have chosen to study only natural disasters to the exclusion of other “disasters” like civil conflicts. I hope to better understand how the U.S. responds to situations in which citizens of other nations face destruction due to impersonal forces, i.e., not closely linked to their own actions, those of their government, or conditions influenced by other countries. Thus, these events are somewhat “apolitical” in a way that armed conflicts are not, and I desire to analyze whether political and economic concerns nonetheless factor into relief aid decisions in these instances. The results of this study are likely to suggest normative implications for the policies and practices that guide the United States in its decisions to allocate disaster relief aid. If it is the case that democracies, for example, are disproportionately favored for relief aid, is this an acceptable component of U.S. aid distributions? Should countries grant more aid following a disaster to nations with more “favorable” characteristics than others? Or is it problematic that individual people, potentially with no hand in choosing these characteristics, are passed over for aid? Alternatively, it may be true that the U.S. allocates aid almost entirely on the basis of need, and one might argue that there are other important considerations beyond this one. A background of knowledge regarding our nation’s behavior related to relief aid dispensation is a useful beginning point for examining these types of questions and the implications they have for current modes of distribution. The intent of this study is to contribute to the conversation surrounding this knowledge. To accomplish this, I conduct a quantitative analysis examining cases of international natural disasters spanning the time period from 1991 to 2014. My study is divided into two main parts: a selection stage and an allocation stage. In the selection stage, I examine a number of variables’ effects on a country’s likelihood of receiving aid at all, and in the allocation stage, I analyze the variables’ influences on the actual amount of aid a country receives. I believe that need factors are important in both relief aid selection and allocation, but that “self-interest” factors such as political and economic ties also influence aid flows. My findings support this theory, particularly regarding the United States’ decision of whether or not to grant any aid to a foreign country at all.Bachelor of Art