Diplomacy and aid in Africa

By THE DATA TEAM

THE United Nations General Assembly is one of the few great levellers in life. In it a tiny country such as Comoros, with a population of less than a million people and a land mass smaller than that of Rhode Island (America’s smallest state) has the same voting power as India, with a population over a thousand times larger. Little wonder then that the great powers spend so much time courting the minnows, and showering them with aid, to keep them on side when resolutions come up before the UN.

AidData, a project based at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, keeps a huge database on official aid flows. Its number-crunching shows how much China appears to reward African countries that vote with it. The relationship is not a simple one: China gives proportionally more money to poorer countries, for instance. But, by and large, countries that support China do better (as the line showing the statistical relationship between votes and aid shows).

More interesting perhaps than how African countries did in the past is how they might do if they changed their votes. A predictive model constructed by AidData shows that if African countries voted with China an extra 10% of the time, they would get an 86% bump in official aid on average. UN ambassadors of African countries wondering how they might do if they change their voting patterns can click on the chart above, but they ought to bear in mind donors other than China who also look closely at voting allegiances.

Read more here.