Political science and its role in development

This week's meeting featured Professor Dan Nielson, an associate professor of political science at BYU. He spoke about the influence of political science in development.  In two major development journals he mentioned that the breakdown of the authors' backgrounds is as follows:

Economics - 30%
Sociology - 20%
Poli. Sci. - 10%

What Poli. Sci. adds:

Political Development/Democratization
Politics of Development

Randomized trials are new trend in development research. People hope to use the kinds of methods that are used to test the effects of medicines on people to see the effects of development efforts on the lives of people. The biggest group doing these trials is the Poverty Action Lab at MIT.

There are two major kinds of aid:
o Bilateral (single donor)
o Multilateral (multiple countries are donors)
What's the ratio?
0.91 : 1
When people talk about aid, they are referring to multilateral more than bilateral.
In the IMF, 20% of the fund comes from governments. The other 80% comes from debt-bond sales.

Some years, IMF is a VERY large portion of total aid. Some years, minuscule. The World Bank, however, is a lot more constant.

Governance Aid tends to work!
Findings show that countries that receive governance aid (aid to promote less corruption, good government, police force improvement, democratization, etc.) actually have significant development and improvement. This is good, because it is a good portion of total aid.

Dr. Nielson has been working on a research project for the past several years called Project Level Aid (PLAID) which  is intended to be the largest database of project-level information about bilateral and multilateral foreign aid activities to date. PLAID is being created in conjuction with BYU and the College of William and Mary. With this information, a much more comprehensive picture of what donors have done in developing countries will be available and better testing of the effects of this aid will be possible. PLAID's anticipated public release date is scheduled for next spring or summer.


Coming up next week: We will hear from Unitus and Kiva, two microfinance organizations. Come and learn how you can get involved  in microfinance.   Thursday 7:30 PM, 238 HRCB