U of I
Research: When aid brings conflict, not relief
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[February 05, 2015]
URBANA - Although you might expect that
providing aid to impoverished villages in the Philippines could only
bring them relief, a University of Illinois study found that the
villages that qualified for some forms of aid actually saw an
increase in violent conflict.
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“Interestingly, those municipalities that were eligible to
receive aid but didn’t accept it saw the largest increase in
violence,” said U of I economist Ben Crost. “During what’s
called the social preparation phase, it becomes known that the
village is eligible for aid. Insurgent forces from the communist
New People’s Army or a Muslim separatist group attack and then
the village drops out of the program because they are
intimidated. That’s why the places that didn’t participate saw
the most violence.”
Between 2003 and 2008, more than 4,000 villages received aid
through a flagship community-driven development program in the
Philippines. The program used an arbitrary threshold of 25
percent to determine the poverty level at which communities
qualified to receive aid.
“Only the 25 percent of the poorest municipalities qualified to
receive aid,” Crost explained. “Those above the threshold are
barely too rich to get it, and the others are just poor enough
to get it. That means that these places should be comparable in
all respects with the one exception that these slightly poorer
places were much more likely to receive aid than the slightly
richer places. So they were almost the same in poverty levels
and in background levels of violence.” The same, until they
became eligible for aid, that is.
“The way they targeted it with this arbitrary 25 percent cutoff
allowed us to compare places that were just below the cutoff to
places that were just above it,” Crost said.
Aid data from the World Bank were analyzed with data on conflict
in the Philippines that was provided by his co-author from
Stanford University, Joe Felter.
were
worried about insurgent attacks.”
[to top of second column] |
Ironically, projects anticipated to be most appreciated by the
people receiving them may place them at a higher risk of being
attacked. “We think that one mechanism that explains our results
is that the insurgents actually tried to derail the project,”
Crost said. “They didn’t want it to succeed. The insurgents had
an incentive to strike and try to sabotage the program before it
ever took off because its success would weaken their support in
the population. We know that some of the municipalities actually
dropped out of the program for this reason – because they
Crost’s recent research is looking for ways to provide aid to
those who need it that doesn’t also make them visible targets
that are easy to attack. He said that because of the very public
participation component in the community-driven development
program, it was easier to derail.
“The aid in this case was given for improvements in
infrastructure,” Crost said. “We need to find a more hidden way
to give aid. One program we’re looking at now is conditional
cash transfers, in which poor families get money if they do
things like send their kids to school or have them vaccinated.
These programs are popular in many developing countries. We have
found some suggestive evidence that this kind of aid led to a
decrease in violence—or at least we don’t find any evidence that
it leads to an increase like we saw in this study.”
Crost said that, unfortunately, most of the evidence that has
come out since this paper was published points in the same
direction. “There’s evidence on U.S. food aid and on the
national rural employment guarantee scheme in India, which is a
huge anti-poverty program. Both of these studies found the same
effect - that conflict increases in the places that get aid.”
“Aid Under Fire: Development Projects and Civil Conflict” was
published in a recent issue of American Economic Review and
written by Benjamin Crost, Joseph Felter, and Patrick Johnston.
[Debra Levy Larson, University of
Illinois College of ACES] |