Research Magazine 2019

Conflict and aid dependency – An explorative study motivated by the case of Palestine

Marcus Marktanner and Almuth D. Merkel

Coles Research Symposium on Homeland Security Special Issue, SIFALL18-07, October 2018

Confronted by external and internal conflict, foreign aid has become Palestine’s lifeline. However, the interaction between aid and conflict is unclear from two perspectives. First, prevalent aid-dependency concepts ignore the dynamic effects of accumulation. Second, while aid is given under the assumption that both donors and recipients want to build peace, shirking for the purpose of generating income from aid cannot be ruled out. Motivated by Palestine’s case, we explore cumulative aid dependency as a function of cumulative conflict from a cross-sectional perspective. Our results suggest both long- and short-term relationships between aid dependency and conflict. We find that aid dependency and conflict cause each other, in Granger’s sense, and conclude that aid may be less effective in reducing conflict than conflict is in securing income. Overview

22 | Coles Research Symposium

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