Higher resolution file here.
This animated cartogram, created by William and Mary student Ashley Ingram and blogged by Mike Tierney at AidData’s The First Tranche, shows aid flows from the US government to the rest of the world from 1985 to 2008.
To produce these maps, the geographic area of a country is replaced by the dollar value of its aid, so that the size of a country fluctuates from year to year depending on how much money the US sends it for development assistance. At the same time, the countries are shaded lighter or darker according to per capita income levels.
As the Cold War ends, the relatively rich countries of the ex-USSR and Eastern Europe appear and then disappear from the map. Light blue Sub-Saharan Africa starts out tiny and cramped throughout the 80s and 90s, and starts to fill out in the mid 2000s.
Most strikingly, the Middle East dominates the map throughout almost the entire period, with Egypt appearing as the largest country for many consecutive years. Jordan and dark blue Israel are also very visible (although I’m not sure why aid to Israel is included since it’s not traditionally considered development assistance in the data sets that AidData pulls from). In 2003, Iraq explodes onto the map right in the center, and the map begins to take on the contours of the world around us today, with economically devastated Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan as the twin hotspots that absorb so much US attention and resources.
Besides being fun to play and re-play, the map helps the viewer step back, look at the big picture, and identify broad geographical trends (provided of course that the underlying data is good enough to make these broad strokes accurate, which is always a good question to ask).
Is US aid doing better at getting to the world’s poorest countries? What geopolitical forces shape US aid spending? How long-lasting are the effects of wars, upheavals, and political change on US priorities? As Mike points out, maps like this don’t give definitive answers, but they may spark creativity in thinking of new good questions.
7 Comments
This cartogram was fascinating! It is interesting to notice a few trends. As you point out, the Middle East dominates the animation, with Egypt being the principal recipient of US aid for the first 18 years of the simulation. Iraq conquers that top spot in 2003, as would be expected, but I’m still surprised that the large majority of aid goes to Middle Eastern nations. Had I been asked prior to reading this article, I would have assumed African nations to be the primary aid recipients.
It appears that Columbia is the principal recipient of money in South America now, whereas aid to Central American countries has decreased considerably (percentage-wise) in the 23 year time frame. Most interesting to me, though, is that African nations – other than South Africa – are relatively absent in this animation until about the year 2000, and it leads me to wonder what correlation there might be with the Millennium Development Goals. Has US aid spending in Africa increased because of the MDGs? While it is somewhat simple to draw this conclusion, it seems like war and political instability (including drug wars in South America) help direct aid to certain countries.
Well, Tierny writes that this cartogram is meant to measure “U.S. aid,” not “development assistance.”
If anything I feel like Israel should be larger. According to USAID, Israel receives substantially more than Egypt: about $2.75 billion for Israel in 2010 vs. about $1.5 billion for Egypt the same year.
http://foreignassistance.gov/OU.aspx?OUID=164&FY=2011
And that’s not even adjusted for population size. With a measly seven and a half million citizens, Israel receives about $372 per capita, vs. less than $20 per capita in Egypt, with about 83 million people.
All the data reflected in these animations come from the OECD CRS. That is still the primary source within AidData for aid from the United States government (though we are working on other sources that would allow you to pick and choose source depending on your research question). So, what you see represented in the cartograms are the official statistics released by the U.S. government to the OECD.
If you use the “research release” on the AidData site you can also get flows from OPIC and EXIM, but these are not reflected in the maps above. Originally when Ashley did the maps she included OPIC and EXIM and the map looked very different. I remember oil rich countries like Gabon looked huge on the screen and said, “what the heck is that?” You would want to include those flows for some research questions. We decided to exclude them in these two cartograms since we were more interested in aid than we were aid plus export subsides plus risk insurance. The cartograms above also do NOT include military assistance, foreign direct investment, or official loans. The pictures you generate look very different depending on what data is included and even depending on what you tell the computer program to do. I would treat these pictures as a jumping off point to learn MORE about the underlying data.
@Jacob — The discrepancy between what you see in AidData and what you see on foreignassistance.gov is probably due to the fact that military aid is not included in the OECD data which, as Mike Tierney notes, forms the core of US data for AidData.org. The dollars on foreignasstance.gov talk about combatting WMDs and other security related items, while the larger commitments in AidData are for “General Budget Support”. They are substantively very different types of aid.
Ah – acronym support request:
What do OPIC and EXIM stand for?
An amazing graphic – thanks for sharing.
OPIC is the Overseas Private Investment Corporation.
EXIM is the Export Import Bank of the United States.
@Anna Thanks for the info! I checked out AidData’s data on aid to Israel, and sure enough they get their data from the OECD, which generally leaves out military aid, and Israel’s figures are much lower than what USAID reports. In 2004, for example, the OECD/AidData data show that Israel only received $500 million, mostly to “support policy reform for financial stability,” although there is a little something for fighting terrorism as well.
Learning something new every day…
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