
In an unprecedented move, the Trump administration has frozen the vast majority of U.S.-funded international development and humanitarian assistance. Grantees running vaccination programs, water supply and sanitation initiatives, school nutrition programs, and much, much more all received stop-work notices in late January. On Feb. 1, the website for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) went dark, and on Feb. 3, news outlets reported on presidential adviser Elon Musk’s plans to eliminate USAID altogether. This halt in aid – and potential permanent termination of aid programs – risks harming the people who have been benefiting from these programs, many of whom rely on the aid to avoid poverty, sickness, or premature death.
Research also suggests there will be consequences beyond the immediate material and humanitarian impact on aid recipients. Over the past decade, social scientists have used rigorous research methods to provide evidence that aid has an impact on international public opinion. This research shows that places receiving aid and people exposed to information about aid feel more positively about the foreign donor providing the aid.
Countries that receive more aid are more positive toward donors
Different countries receive different levels of foreign aid. Do places receiving more aid hold more favorable opinions toward the donor? This is a hard question to research because donor countries may give more aid to places that have more – or less – favorable opinions about the donor in the first place. Does the U.S. help countries because they are friendly already? Or do countries become friendlier when they receive U.S. help?
One study takes advantage of the fact that U.S. spending under the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) is allocated based on HIV prevalence across countries. The authors argue that HIV prevalence should not be associated with opinions about the United States. Therefore, if countries receiving more PEPFAR aid have more positive opinions about the United States, that difference can plausibly be attributed to the foreign aid. This is exactly what the study finds. A doubling in PEPFAR assistance corresponds to a 20% improvement in the ratio of people saying that they approve of the United States relative to those saying that they disapprove.
The ability of a donor country to provide aid over time can also produce variation in aid flows that is unrelated to pre-existing sentiments toward the donor. One study of Chinese aid exploits such variation to show that the completion of Chinese development projects increases support for the Chinese government in the countries receiving that bilateral aid. Emphasizing the importance of public opinion, the authors note how this effect can be identified among countries that are potential swing voters in the U.N. General Assembly.
More examples of how to study the impact of foreign aid
To find variation in aid flows, we also can take advantage of the randomness inherent in natural disasters, like earthquakes. The fault line of an earthquake is unlikely to correspond to pro-donor or anti-donor sentiment. But foreign assistance will flow to places close to the epicenter. After a 2004 earthquake in northern Pakistan, here’s what one study found. People living near the earthquake fault line – and thus in communities more likely to receive humanitarian assistance provided by international donors and international nongovernmental organizations – were 30 percentage points more likely to express trust in foreigners than people living far from the fault line. The differences could be seen even four years after the earthquake, an indication that some of these attitudinal shifts are not just transitory good will.
It’s not always possible to identify sources of variation in aid flows that are unrelated to preexisting attitudes. But we can work to find other ways of making good comparisons. One study of U.S. and Chinese aid in Africa makes comparisons between places where a development project is happening and places where a development project will happen in the future. Since both sets of places have been selected for a development project, they are likely to share characteristics that led to that selection. But in one place, people have had an opportunity to see and experience the development project.
The study finds that U.S. aid improves perceptions of the United States and alignment with U.S. values but – in tension with the study reviewed above – that Chinese aid does not have similar effects.
People who learn about foreign aid are more positive toward donors
Another set of studies takes a different approach by exposing some people, but not others, to information about foreign aid to see if doing so shifts individual attitudes. By using experimental methods, research in this tradition can be more confident that it is the information about the aid that explains any difference in attitudes.
In my coauthored research in Bangladesh, for example, we show that people express more positive opinions about the United States when they have been told about the U.S. role in funding the Smiling Sun Clinics, a nationwide network of health clinics. Our evidence suggests that these effects, however, may be limited in scope: We do not observe significant differences in people’s willingness to take pro-U.S. policy positions.
In another research project, we look at Japanese aid in Uganda. My coauthors and I find a similar increase in positive attitudes about Japan among the set of survey respondents who were told that Japan had funded specific projects in their community. Many of these respondents also said that Japan deserved credit for the benefits that the projects had provided to their community.
Other scholars have used this type of research design to show that information about foreign aid can have effects on third-party observers. So it’s not just about the aid recipients: Onlookers far away might feel favorably about another country’s humanitarian assistance. One such study, for instance, found Australians who learn about South Korean aid to Cambodia express more positive opinions about South Korea. Information about Chinese aid to Cambodia, however, does not have an effect on perceptions of China in the same population.
Foreign aid is a meaningful soft power tool
The studies described above support the theory that foreign aid serves an important diplomatic function, winning over hearts and minds in aid-receiving countries. As such, aid is a clear tool for generating what political scientist Joseph Nye famously characterized as “soft power,” the ability to get other countries to want what you want by persuasion and attraction rather than through the use of military or economic threats.
The evidence is not iron-clad. Research about international aid in Afghanistan failed to show a connection between aid flows and attitudes toward foreigners. And correlational evidence suggests that U.S. aid to non-democratic countries may worsen attitudes toward the United States among regime opponents. But overall, the balance of evidence suggests that foreign aid can be a meaningful tool for generating soft-power resources.
Before the current freeze, the USAID website emphasized that American aid was “America’s good-news story,” (see web archive of page here) serving an important diplomatic function.
The sudden freeze on U.S. foreign assistance, the interruption in aid programs that it has caused, and the threats to future foreign assistance operations now risk turning a “good news story” into a bad one. Will global public opinion about the United States be worse relative to what it otherwise would have been?
Matthew S. Winters is professor in the Department of Political Science and director of the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies at the University of Illinois.