IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/usg/econwp/201911.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Born in the Right Place? Health Ministers, Foreign Aid and Infant Mortality

Author

Listed:
  • Widmer, Philine
  • Zurlinden, Noémie

Abstract

We conduct a systematic study of favoritism by cabinet members in Africa with continentwide coverage (47 countries). We hand-collect birthplace information for all cabinet members between 2001 and 2014 and provide causal evidence of favoritism by health ministers. First, administrative regions receive more World Bank health aid when a region-born health minister is in office. Second, neonates and infants are less likely to die when the current health minister originates from their region. However, the reduction in mortality is not associated with increased health aid, implying that health ministers' favoritism also occurs through other channels.

Suggested Citation

  • Widmer, Philine & Zurlinden, Noémie, 2019. "Born in the Right Place? Health Ministers, Foreign Aid and Infant Mortality," Economics Working Paper Series 1911, University of St. Gallen, School of Economics and Political Science, revised Apr 2021.
    • Handle: RePEc:usg:econwp:2019:11
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://ux-tauri.unisg.ch/RePEc/usg/econwp/EWP-1911.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Cruzatti C., John & Dreher, Axel & Matzat, Johannes, 2023. "Chinese aid and health at the country and local level," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 167(C).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    FForeign aid; favoritism; political capture; patronage; clientelism; aid allocation; Africa; World Bank; infant mortality; child health; georeferenced data; spatial analysis;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D73 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Bureaucracy; Administrative Processes in Public Organizations; Corruption
    • F35 - International Economics - - International Finance - - - Foreign Aid
    • I10 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - General
    • J13 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Fertility; Family Planning; Child Care; Children; Youth
    • I18 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Government Policy; Regulation; Public Health
    • R11 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - General Regional Economics - - - Regional Economic Activity: Growth, Development, Environmental Issues, and Changes

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:usg:econwp:2019:11. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/vwasgch.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.