Pengar från höger och vänster? En komparativ studie om skillnaden i biståndsallokering mellan vänster- och högerregeringar

Sammanfattning: Research shows that aid in many cases is given with a political strategy. Since aid is financed by taxpayers, we find it interesting and relevant to further investigate the political motives behind Swedish aid and if the focus of Swedish aid has differed across time and elected governments. The aim is to empirically investigate the role of the character of the recipient countries and the role of the political ideology of the Swedish government for Swedish aid allocation. Using panel data, with all the 136 countries who received Swedish aid at least once between 1998-2016, we investigate whether Swedish Official Development Assistance (ODA) disbursement follows a common line or differ across governments. Particularly, we focus on whether different types of governments’ premier​altruistic and/or​political strategic interests in their assistance policy. Using a tobit model with time fixed effects, we first focus on altruistic variables, such as and HDI, GDI and a Human Rights Index. For the political strategic framework we look closer at Swedish exports to recipient countries, FDI as percentage of GDP, ODA as percentage of GNI and regional differences. The empirical results suggest there are small differences between governments. The significant differences appear for FDI as percentage of GDP, countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and the level of human rights. All these variables are significant when observing aid allocation from right wing governments but do not come with a significant effect for governments to the left. However, a tendency towards a common altruistic and strategic policy can be found for all governments during the time period examined.