UNITED-STATES ECONOMIC-AID AND POLITICAL REPRESSION - AN EMPIRICAL-EVALUATION OF UNITED-STATES-FOREIGN-POLICY

The U.S. Congress has mandated that foreign aid be used in a manner th at distances the U.S. from regimes which consistently violate the huma n rights of their populations, and promotes more acceptable human righ ts records in recipient countries. There has been considerable scholar ly attention devoted to the first of these congressional mandates, tho ugh as yet little effort has been made to evaluate the effectiveness o f U.S. foreign aid programs in actually changing human rights behavior . This essay is a first attempt at evaluating the impact of changes in economic assistance on changes in the amount of political abuse perpe trated by those on the receiving end of the assistance programs. Altho ugh others have shown that Carter and Reagan distributed their respect ive aid programs differently, the findings presented below demonstrate 'that economic aid has no discernable effect on the human rights reco rds of the recipients; this result holds across both the Carter and Re agan administrations.