Pathways to development

This thesis consists of four articles and an introduction. It contributes to the debate on development, development aid and poverty reduction, and identifies possible pathways to development. In particular, I study financing of development aid projects, and farmers’ organizations and legal origins contributions tp poverty reduction. Most charity organizations depend on contributions from the general public, but little research is conducted on donor preferences in Norway. Designing a conjoint analysis experiment in which people rate development aid projects by donating money in dictator games, we find that our sample show strong age, gender, regional, and thematic preferences for development aid projects run by non-governmental organizations. We also find significant differences in preferences between female and male donors. We develop a model of charitable donations with uncertainty. We increase the uncertainty of the projects by omitting information about some of the characteristics and varying the presented project information to induce differences in utility derived from the donations. As predicted by our theory, we find that omitting information about the project reduces donations. I study the welfare effect of membership in farmers’ organizations in Mozabique using difference-in-difference estimators that control for unobservable selection bias. I find a positive impact of membership on the marketed surplus, the value of agricultural production and on total income, indicating that support to farmers’ organizations can contribute to poverty reduction. Finally, I study the associations between legal origin in explaining levels of poverty, income inequality, and miserliness of countries, and I find no consistent difference between countries with French and English legal origin on these outcomes. Moreover, French legal origin correlates negatively with income inequality and miserliness in Sub-Saharan Africa