تعادل چندگانه ناشی از سیاست های کمک دهنده در توسعه اقتصادی

This paper presents a neoclassical growth model comprising education and child labor with a focus on developing and aid-receiving countries to demonstrate cyclical growth and bifurcation in economic development. The appearance of multiple equilibria has often been attributed to the internal affairs of recipient countries, such as technology in production, subsistence minimum in consumption, and liquidity constraints in investment. The main argument of this paper is that the aid allocation policy employed by donor countries, thereby the motive of aid-providers, leads to divaricated and cyclical development in the recipient countries.

Developed countries have repeatedly made large fiscal transfers to developing countries in order to aid their economic takeoff. The impact of foreign aid from donors to recipient countries varies across countries. These variations can primarily be explained by a set of particular circumstances in the recipient countries. The empirical study of Burnside and Dollar (2000) has piqued our interest in good policies in the recipient countries. The study found that the contribution of development aid to economic growth is more in countries that have a good policy environment than in those that are not well governed. This result has been reexamined by many researchers in order to develop a better understanding of aid effectiveness. 1 The persistent differences in growth rates of less-developed countries have also been explained by theoretical researchers. One of the contributory explanations is the existence of a threshold effect arising from discontinuity in the use of technology, as shown by Azariadis and Drazen (1990). When production technology in an aid-receiving country is a step function with a jump at some critical level of physical/human capital, the economy exhibits bifurcation; this leads to an environment where stagnant countries and countries succeeding in economic takeoff coexist.2 This argument calls for a bifurcation mechanism on the technological features of aid-receiving countries. The other factors causing bifurcation in economic growth, as shown in most of the preceding theoretical studies, are the existence of a subsistence minimum in consumption, liquidity constraints in investment, and the nature of increasing returns in production; moreover, all of these factors are based on the internal affairs of the target countries, i.e., their preferences, technology, and market conditions.3

In this paper, we formulated a neoclassical growth model comprising education, child labor, and cash transfer, with a focus on developing and aid-receiving countries. While numerous preceding studies have explained the bifurcation in economic development in terms of internal affairs, the main argument of this paper is that the aid allocation policy employed by donor countries, thereby the strategy of aid providers, leads to divaricated and cyclical growth in economic development. A noteworthy feature of this paper is that in describing the donor-recipient relationship, we formally incorporated certain critical factors of developing countries, such as fungibility, fertility, and children’s labor-education trade-off. This enabled us to examine the impact of internal policies related to these factors on the growth path of economic development. Although the main argument of this paper was to show the possibility of multiple equilibria and cyclical growth caused by donor countries’ aid policies, which was captured by setting the benchmark level, View the MathML sourceh¯, our results imply that the larger the fraction of aid devoted to education, q, the higher is the possibility of cyclical growth. It goes without saying that the fraction of aid devoted to education is not the only the root factor that causes the cyclical growth or multiple equilibria. Hence, theoretically, we have not been able to precisely show which country may experience a cyclical growth or multiple equilibria on the basis of its share of education spending. However, based on the fact that the fraction of aid devoted to education has been increasing over time, our results imply that the economy has a tendency to experience cyclical growth, given other factors constant.