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Existing studies of foreign aid suggest that donor countries' economic groups, such as exporters, should be generally opposed to multilateral aid because multilateral flows do not allow donor countries to tie their aid implicitly or explicitly to the promotion of their domestic economic interests. However, economic groups can actually benefit from some types of multilateral aid, and this serves as an incentive for donor governments to support international organizations generating the benefits. I test my argument using data on aid allocated to the Multilateral Fund for the Implementation of the Montreal Protocol and the Global Environment Facility, and international trade by commodity. I find robust empirical support for the argument that when donors' domestic economic groups are likely to gain from opportunities created by international environmental organizations' programs, donor governments increase aid allocations to these organizations. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractExisting studies of foreign aid suggest that donor countries' economic groups, such as exporters, should be generally opposed to multilateral aid because multilateral flows do not allow donor countries to tie their aid implicitly or explicitly to the promotion of their domestic economic interests. However, economic groups can actually benefit from some types of multilateral aid, and this serves as an incentive for donor governments to support international organizations generating the benefits. I test my argument using data on aid allocated to the Multilateral Fund for the Implementation of the Montreal Protocol and the Global Environment Facility, and international trade by commodity. I find robust empirical support for the argument that when donors' domestic economic groups are likely to gain from opportunities created by international environmental organizations' programs, donor governments increase aid allocations to these organizations.

Over the past three decades multilateral financial aid has become an important institutional arrangement enabling environmental cooperation between developed and developing countries. However, previous research suggests that financial institutions are largely ineffective in achieving environmental goals. I show that financial assistance can be successful in increasing recipients' contributions to environmental programs, thereby promoting environmental protection. This positive impact of aid, I argue, should be attributed to the effects of donor-recipient interactions that can alter incentives of recipient governments and induce their cooperation rather than to capacity building through inflows of aid. I study environmental assistance by first developing a game-theoretic model of strategic interaction between the donor and aid recipients. To avoid a common methodological problem of misspecification and to unify theory with empirical testing, I then derive a strategic statistical model and conduct empirical tests using a new dataset on projects financed by the Global Environment Facility.

This study examines the relationship between disaster risks and interstate conflict. We argue that in disaster-prone areas actors' rational expectations about the likelihood and magnitude of potential future disasters can make conflict more likely. The relationship emerges when future disasters are viewed as shocks that are expected to shift the relative power balance among states. If large enough, such expected shifts can generate commitment problems and cause conflict even before any disasters take place. Our approach represents a shift of focus from previous research, which investigates the effect of actual disasters and ignores rational expectations regarding future events. We use a simple game-theoretic model to highlight the commitment problem caused by disaster risks. We then discuss and apply an empirical strategy enabling us to disentangle effects of disaster proneness from effects of actual disaster events. Our results indicate that greater disaster risks are indeed associated with a higher likelihood of interstate conflict.

Sanctions restrict or terminate economic relations between two or more countries, directly and negatively influencing sanctioned countries' companies. We argue that sanctions are similar to recessions—both reduce economic activity in affected countries. Less economic activity results in a lower accident risk as companies use their productive facilities less. Reduced revenues also force companies to adjust by cutting costs, which includes spending on safety. Hence, accident damage should increase under sanctions. Governments can intervene by enforcing safety regulations, and their incentives to do so are stronger in democracies, where citizens can more easily remove politicians from office. Therefore, accident damage increases only in nondemocratic countries, while democracies succeed in maintaining technological safety and hence sanctions do not affect accident damage.

Economic sanctions research suggests that sanctioned countries' overall economic costs tend to be low. This article argues that, despite this, sanction costs can force the governments of these countries to reallocate budget resources from low-priority spending categories to other categories in an effort to minimize their political costs. One such low-priority category is disaster preparedness and mitigation. The authors show that economic sanctions lead to reduced disaster preparedness spending and, as a result, increase the scale of economic and human losses generated by natural disasters in sanctioned countries.

Carbon sequestration through capture and storage in subsurface porous geologic formations is one potential method for mitigating the problem of climate change due to emission of anthropogenic CO2. In fact, in a world highly dependent on energy derived from hydrocarbons and coal, carbon capture and storage may represent the most promising approach to maintaining industrial development in the present period, while implementing other solutions that will deliver sustainable reductions in CO2 emissions in the long run. Some countries have initiated pilot and large-scale projects to develop and improve carbon capture and storage technology, while others are slow to follow. What explains this variation? We develop a theory of the political economy of technology adoption to explore conditions under which countries are more likely to implement carbon capture and storage projects. We find that the likelihood of such projects depends on governments' policy positions and industries' research and development capacity. Data analysis of carbon capture and storage projects provides evidence in support of our theoretical expectations.