Distributive justice in the financing of public foreign aid for development

Abstract

ABSTRACT: How should the aid financial burden be distributed across donor governments? This article discusses the "distributive justice" of the current aid-financing pattern, and advocates a progressive modality in which citizens from donor countries with higher living standards contribute proportionally more than citizens from countries with lower living standards. For this purpose, we conceive public foreign aid as a tax mechanism for redistributing income on a worldwide scale. The progressivity analysis for 45 bilateral donors (28 DAC countries and 17 non-DAC donors) using concentration curves and Suits indexes between 2000 and 2012 shows that the current distribution of the aid burden is insufficiently progressive (mainly due to the limited contributions of the richer donors). Finally, we argue that a progressive exaction scheme will improve the distributive justice of the aid system.