I am a PhD candidate at American University in Washington, DC. I am interested in state formation and governance in low income countries. My dissertation examines the influence of foreign aid on incumbent advantage in African presidential elections.aidinfo
Aidinfo will be old news to people already following Owen Barder’s blog, but it is new to me and makes me very excited. A lot of the work that I want to do deals with various political effects of foreign aid in receiving countries, and getting data on aid is notoriously difficult (check out pages 7 to 10 of this paper by Easterly).
Better data collection is good in and of itself, as it builds governmental capacity. More transparency not only reduces corruption, it also is a prerequisite for improving aid efficiency. Aidinfo isn’t tackling all of this, but any effort toward data collection and dissemination is badly needed. Hopefully it is up and running in a year or two so that I can tap it for my thesis.
