An empirical analysis of the determinants of agricultural official development assistance

The aim of this study was to analyse the determining factors of official development assistance (ODA) provided to the agricultural and food sectors. Lack of empirical research on this type of ODA makes this study stand out from the sea of qualitative approaches. By analysing the agricultural sectors and the views of aid recipient countries, this paper provides evidence-based explanations for the aid flows between donor and recipient countries. Using disbursement ODA data covering 141 countries over 2002-2012, we devise and estimate a gravity model. Heckman’s two-step approach is adopted to address a potential bias arising from the selection of aid recipient countries. The estimated results confirm that agricultural aid is mainly governed by the needs of the recipient countries with regard to factors such as undernourishment and food inadequacy rates, depth of food deficits and political circumstances. As expected, the results indicate that food aid is influenced mostly by humanitarian factors.