Foreign aid’s hidden benefit: Recipients are more likely to pay the generosity forward

Foreign aid may not improve how recipients view donor countries – but it can set off a chain of goodwill that spreads far beyond the original act of giving.

That is what a colleague and I found when we studied how South Koreans responded to COVID-19 vaccines donated by the United States.

The South Korean government reserved donated Johnson & Johnson vaccines for military reservists and, for medical reasons, excluded anyone under 30. As a result, we could compare the views of South Koreans just above and below that threshold.

We found that the donated vaccines did not improve people’s views of the United States. South Koreans who received American vaccines reported similar views of the U.S. as those who had not been vaccinated.

Yet the results were striking in another way. Those who received donated American vaccines became more supportive of their own government sending aid abroad. Recipients shifted from neutrality on the matter to expressing moderate support for foreign aid, scoring about one point higher on a seven-point scale than those who didn’t make the eligibility cutoff.

There is also evidence that these effects extend beyond direct recipients. South Koreans who were simply told that the U.S. was providing vaccine aid to developing countries also became more supportive of their own government doing the same – though this effect was concentrated among political moderates.

Together, these patterns point to what social scientists call “generalized reciprocity” – the impulse not to repay kindness directly but to pass it on. In this way, one act of aid can prompt another, and spread across borders.

Why it matters

From Washington and London to Berlin and Tokyo, foreign aid budgets have been cut. In November 2020, former U.S. Agency for International Development Administrator Samantha Power invoked a common assumption when she argued that providing vaccines abroad would restore American leadership – that the value of aid lies in the goodwill it generates toward the donor.

Our findings suggest this is one way aid can matter, but not necessarily the most important.

Instead, aid may foster a form of international cooperation that does not depend on treaties or direct reciprocity between nations but emerges from ordinary people’s willingness to pass on goodwill.

If aid can trigger chains of giving across borders, then how we assess its value may need to change. Current frameworks tend to emphasize donor nations’ direct returns or strategic benefits, but the cooperative effects we identify are largely invisible to those metrics.

This suggests that current cuts may be shutting down effects that policymakers have not yet learned to measure – a form of international cooperation that, once set in motion, can generate cascading effects well beyond what any single donor nation could achieve alone.

What we don’t know

Important questions remain: Do similar patterns emerge with other forms of aid – such as disaster relief, food assistance or long-term development programs? And how long do these effects last?

There are also hints that the threshold for triggering this response may be lower than previously thought. The effect persisted even when using eligibility for donated vaccines, rather than actual receipt, as the measure – suggesting proximity to aid, not just receipt, may be enough to activate the impulse to give.

If evidence that past recipients of aid have themselves become donors strengthens public support for giving in donor countries, then aid may be more self-sustaining than critics assume – reinforced not just by its immediate effects, but by the example it sets.

The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.

JB Bae does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.