Thèse la Nouvelle Économie Politique de l'Aide au Développement Trois Essais H/F - Doctorat.Gouv.Fr

Établissement : Université Paris-Saclay GS Economie & Management École doctorale : Droit, Economie, Management Laboratoire de recherche : RITM - Réseaux Innovation Territoires et Mondialisation Direction de la thèse : Jean Noël SENNE ORCID 0000000194779606 Début de la thèse : 2026-10-01 Date limite de candidature : 2026-05-11T23:59:59 Cette thèse examine les déterminants de l'allocation de l'aide internationale au développement dans un contexte marqué par de profondes transformations mondiales. Le système d'aide connaît actuellement des changements majeurs, sous l'effet de pressions géopolitiques, budgétaires, environnementales et institutionnelles. Les pays donateurs utilisent de plus en plus l'aide à des fins stratégiques, tout en faisant face à des contraintes internes qui limitent leur capacité et leur volonté de maintenir leurs engagements. Par ailleurs, avec l'émergence de nouveaux donateurs, comme la Chine, ainsi que le développement de nouveaux instruments de financement, la structure de l'aide internationale se transforme. Dans ce contexte, cette étude analyse comment des facteurs politiques, stratégiques, économiques et institutionnels façonnent conjointement l'allocation de l'aide internationale selon les donateurs, les bénéficiaires, les volumes et les canaux.

La thèse s'articule autour de trois axes de recherche interdépendants. Le premier axe étudie l'effet du populisme dans les pays donateurs sur le volume et la composition de l'aide bilatérale. La montée récente des mouvements populistes dans les pays développés a modifié l'environnement politique des décisions d'aide. Les recherches suggèrent que le populisme réduit le soutien public à l'aide et détourne celle-ci des canaux multilatéraux. Toutefois, les mécanismes précis et l'ampleur de ces effets restent incertains. Cet axe analyse ainsi l'impact du populisme sur le volume et la composition de l'aide bilatérale dans 49 pays donateurs entre 2002 et 2022.

Le deuxième axe examine l'impact des financements chinois d'infrastructures sur le commerce international. La Chine a engagé ces dernières années des milliards de dollars dans des projets à l'étranger, principalement dans les infrastructures. Ces investissements sont censés réduire les coûts de transport, améliorer l'accès aux marchés et favoriser l'intégration des économies bénéficiaires dans les chaînes de valeur mondiales. Cependant, les liens de causalité avec les flux commerciaux restent peu établis. Cet axe évalue donc leurs effets à partir de données couvrant 23 816 projets dans 142 pays à revenu faible et intermédiaire entre 2000 et 2023.

Le troisième axe analyse les déterminants de l'allocation des financements chinois au développement. La littérature suggère que ces investissements visent à sécuriser l'accès aux ressources et à renforcer les relations diplomatiques. Les pays riches en ressources stratégiques et politiquement alignés avec la Chine reçoivent davantage de financements. Néanmoins, les preuves causales restent limitées et les interactions entre ressources, qualité institutionnelle et alignement diplomatique sont peu étudiées. Cet axe propose une analyse systématique de ces facteurs entre 2000 et 2023.

Ensemble, ces trois axes offrent une vision d'ensemble de l'économie politique du financement international du développement. En combinant des méthodes causales rigoureuses et des données sur plus de vingt ans, cette thèse contribue à trois champs de recherche : les déterminants politiques de l'aide, les effets économiques des infrastructures et les logiques des financements chinois.
The concept of international foreign aid emerged during World War II. After the war, the United States launched the Marshall Plan (1947) to support the reconstruction of Europe. This initiative is regarded as the first large-scale model of international aid and demonstrated that external financial assistance could promote economic recovery and development (Lancaster, 2007). During the Cold War, foreign aid became a strategic instrument of political influence. Both the United States and the Soviet Union used aid to secure alliances with newly independent countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Following the wave of decolonization and the creation of international institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the perception of aid shifted. Economists argued that many developing countries were trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty. In this context, aid was viewed as a mechanism to finance industrialization and accelerate economic growth in newly independent nation. Since then, the objectives of international aid have continued to evolve, expanding from economic reconstruction to include, successively, economic reform, poverty reduction, and sustainable development.

Several converging developments in the current global landscape make the determinants of international development aid both a pressing and contested subject of inquiry. First, the international order is undergoing a profound geopolitical realignment. The war in Ukraine and the escalation of conflicts in the Middle East have redirected aid flows toward security-linked assistance. At the same time, intensifying multipolar competition-with the United States, China, the European Union, and the Gulf States each leveraging aid as an instrument of influence-has introduced new strategic logics into donor allocation decisions (Stimson Center, 2025, Counsil on Foreign Relations, 2025). The dismantling of USAID beginning in 2025, which resulted in the termination of approximately 83% of its contracts and the absorption of its remaining functions into the State Department, stands as a stark illustration of how profoundly the global aid architecture is being reconfigured (Homeland Security News Wire, 2025). Second, donor countries are operating under mounting fiscal constraints. A combination of domestic political pressures-including rising aid skepticism and populist retrenchment-and a broad reorientation of public expenditure toward defense has prompted major donors such as the United Kingdom, Germany, and France to substantially cut their official development assistance budgets (OECD, 2025a, Focus 2030, 2026). These cuts have also accelerated a structural shift away from grants and toward loans and blended finance instruments, raising fundamental questions about who gives, how much, and on what terms (Donor Tracker, 2026). Third, climate change has emerged as an increasingly central driver of aid allocation. The proliferation of climate finance instruments-including loss and damage funds, green transition support, and adaptation grants-is blurring the boundary between traditional development aid and environmental investment, while climate vulnerability indices are increasingly applied alongside income-based criteria to determine aid eligibility UN OCHA (2025), Greenly (2025).

Finally, recipient-side characteristics continue to shape aid allocation in ways that remain both empirically complex and politically contested. In particular, the literature has highlighted a graduation problem, whereby some middle-income countries lose access to concessional finance or face declining aid flows despite persistent pockets of poverty and high inequality (Hoeffler and Justino, 2023). Meanwhile, aid is increasingly concentrated in fragile and conflict-affected states, giving rise to a structural tension between security imperatives and long-term development objectives (OECD, 2025b, Dreher et al., 2024).

These dynamics are borne out by the most recent data. According to preliminary OECD estimates, global ODA declined by 9% in 2024 and by an estimated 23.1% in 2025, falling to $174.3 billion (OECD, 2025a). For the first time since 1995, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States all cut their ODA in the same year (Focus 2030, 2026). Cuts announced for 2025 are projected to amount to a cumulative reduction of approximately $18 billion relative to 2023 levels among the leading European donors (Donor Tracker, 2026). It is against this backdrop of accelerating change and growing uncertainty that this study undertakes a systematic examination of the structural determinants of international development aid allocation.
This research project aims to expand the evidence base on the structural determinants of international development aid allocation within a context of accelerating global change and growing uncertainty, and to examine the implications of these allocation processes for bilateral trade outcomes and dynamics.

To achieve this, we will contribute to the existing literature in the following ways:

- This study will contribute to the literature on the political determinants of foreign aid by shifting the focus from recipient-side characteristics to donor-side political dynamics. In particular, it examines how populist leadership in donor countries affects the overall volume of bilateral aid disbursements, an area that remains underexplored in comparison to recipient-centered analyzes.

- It will further extend this literature by investigating whether populist governments systematically reallocate aid across sectors, potentially reducing support for specific development priorities such as social infrastructure, economic development, or humanitarian assistance. This allows for a more granular understanding of how ideological orientations shape the structure of aid allocation beyond aggregate volumes.

- This research further contributes to the literature on international development finance by examining how recipient characteristics and geopolitical factors jointly influence allocation decisions. Taking China as a case study, it addresses the limited integration of political alignment, institutional quality, natural resource endowments, and strategic considerations in explaining aid distribution patterns.

- Finally, this research contributes to the literature on international trade by providing a causal empirical analysis of the effects of Chinese infrastructure financing on trade outcomes. It examines whether such investments lead to significant increases in bilateral trade flows between China and recipient countries, and whether these gains represent a net expansion of overall trade or come at the expense of trade with third-country partners-treating trade promotion as a potential but less visible strategic goal of Chinese development finance.
This thesis adopts a quantitative empirical approach grounded in the political economy of international development finance. While the three axes address distinct questions, they share a common methodological philosophy: the use of panel data methods and quasi-experimental designs to move beyond correlational evidence and establish credible causal relationships.
The empirical analyses rely on a combination of international panel datasets covering donor and recipient countries over the 2000-2023 period. Aid flow data are primarily sourced from the OECD Development Finance databases, accessed through Aid Atlas (Atteridge et al., 2019), which provide detailed information on bilateral ODA commitments and disbursements by donor, recipient, sector, and channel. Data on Chinese development finance are drawn from AidData (Custer et al., 2021, Parks et al., 2025), which cover over 23,816 Chinese-financed projects across 142 low- and middle-income countries. Bilateral trade data are obtained from UNCOMTRADE, and country-level macroeconomic and institutional controls are sourced from the World Bank's World Development Indicators (WDI) and Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI). Populism indicators are drawn from the Global Populism Database (GPD v2.1) (Hawkins et al., 2019), and electoral data from the National Elections Database (Marx et al., 2025).A central methodological challenge in this research is endogeneity: aid and trade flows are not allocated randomly, and both may simultaneously influence and be influenced by the political and economic variables of interest. Each axis addresses this challenge through a distinct identification strategy.

The first axis, on populism and foreign aid, employs a Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) that exploits quasi-random variation in close electoral outcomes. By comparing donor countries in which populist candidates narrowly won or lost elections, this approach approximates random assignment of populist leadership and isolates its causal effect on aid allocation from confounding factors.

The second axis, on Chinese infrastructure financing and bilateral trade, relies on an instrumental variable (IV) approach that leverages China's domestic steel production as an exogenous source of variation in infrastructure financing supply, following Dreher et al. (2021). Fluctuations in steel production reflect domestic industrial overcapacity in China and generate exogenous shifts in the supply of infrastructure.

The third axis, on the determinants of Chinese development finance, exploits the timing of oil and gas discoveries as an exogenous source of variation in resource endowments (Cust and Harding, 2020), and by using UN General Assembly voting alignment as a time-varying measure of diplomatic proximity (Dreher et al., 2018).

Le/La candidat.e doit être titulaire (ou en cours d'obtention lors de la phase de sélection) d'un Master Recherche en économie quantitative.

Une bonne maîtrise des méthodes de collecte, d'analyse et de traitement statistique des données est requise. Il est attendu du/de la candidat.e une connaissance approfondie des outils de programmation économétrique (Stata ou R), une bonne maîtrise des systèmes d'information géographique (ArcGis ou QGis), et des compétences en science des données (suivi du Big Data, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Python).

Une expérience professionnelle dans la gestion de projets dans les pays en développement serait un atout supplémentaire précieux.

Une excellente maîtrise de l'anglais est requise (niveau C1 au minimum).