About

Sarah Blodgett Bermeo is an Associate Professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy and an Associate Professor of Political Science at Duke University. She is also an affiliate of the Duke Center for International Development. Her work includes exploring the impact of climate change on migration patterns and investigating how research can guide effective policy decisions. She has been featured in discussions such as the Policy 360 website, where she and her colleague Kerilyn Schewel examine these critical issues.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Computer Security
• Economics
• Economic growth
• Business
• Medicine
• Environmental health

Selected publications

• Trends and challenges in aid allocation

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2024-06-12

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter explores changes over time and differences across donors and recipients in the aid allocation landscape. The reasons driving aid allocation have shifted from the early days of aid as a geopolitical tool during the Cold War to an important foreign policy lever meant to mitigate unwanted impacts on donor states. The last decade has seen a continuing rise of China as a formidable influence in low- and middle-income countries and an uncertain response from other donors. States continue to grapple with the role of aid for global public goods (such as climate change mitigation or pandemic prevention) and the role of bilateral versus multilateral donors in these areas. This chapter provides an overview of the evidence on donor motivations for giving aid, the evolution of these trends, and some insights for current and future aid scholars and practitioners on the motivations behind aid giving.

  PublisherDOI

• Strategic donor behaviour and country vulnerability in health aid transitions

  BMJ Global Health · 2023 · 4 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Medicine
  • Business
  • Economic growth

  BACKGROUND: When countries reach the middle-income threshold, many multilateral donors, including Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance (Gavi), begin to withdraw their official development assistance (ODA), known as graduation. We hypothesised that bilateral donors might follow Gavi's lead, except in countries where they have strategic interests. We aim to understand how bilateral donors behave after a recipient country graduates from Gavi support and how bilateral donors might treat Gavi support countries differently, based on 'strategic interest'. We also aim to identify countries that were more vulnerable to 'simultaneous' transitions and financial cliffs after Gavi transition. METHODS: This is an observational dyadic analysis using longitudinal data. We collected country-level data on 77 Gavi-eligible countries between 2009 and 2018 and paired donor and recipient country in a specific year to conduct dyadic analysis. We included Gavi graduation status and Gavi disbursement as explanatory variables. We controlled for (1) donor-recipient relationship variables that represent potential strategic relationships (eg, distance between donor and recipient country) and (2) recipient-level characteristics (eg, population, income). We used Odinary Least Squares regression, Tobit and two-part model in Stata SE 15.0. FINDINGS: We found a country would receive $3.1 million less all sector ODA from a bilateral donor, and $0.6 million less health ODA, after they graduate from Gavi. For every additional 1% ODA a country would receive from Gavi, it would receive 0.14% more ODA and 0.16% more health ODA from individual bilateral donors. Gavi's graduation status or disbursement brought more change in percentage term to health ODA than to total ODA. Additionally, Gavi's graduation was observed to have a larger negative impact on bilateral ODA in the longer term. Countries that sent more migrants, had been colonised, and received more US military assistance tended to receive more ODA. There are similarities and differences across different donors and bilateral donors tend to provide more ODA to nearby countries and countries receiving fewer exports from the donor. We found that former colonies did not see a decline in aid after Gavi graduation. CONCLUSION: Bilateral donors behave in a similar manner to Gavi when it comes to funding health systems in low and middle-income countries. Therefore, some countries may be at risk of losing donor resources for health from a multitude of sources around the same time. However, countries that have a strategic interest in bilateral donors may be spared from such funding cliffs. This research has important implications for global health donors' funding policies and approaches in addition to recipient countries' transition planning.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Foreign Aid

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2021 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Economic growth

  Abstract This chapter reviews scholarship on the political economy of foreign aid, identifies key gaps in the current literature, and offers suggestions for bridging across dividing lines to advance future research agendas. It highlights potential synergies between the study of foreign aid allocation and aid effectiveness. The analysis draws attention to the need to synthesize across studies of micro-level and macro-level outcomes to understand the full political and economic impacts of aid. Reviewing the literature on differences across types of aid donors shows the need to better understand the relationship between democratic and non-democratic donors and to further study optimal design of development institutions to help meet global challenges addressed through foreign aid, such as climate change and pandemic disease.

  PublisherDOI

• Maximizing Utility vis-à-vis Developing Countries

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2018-06-21

  book1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter develops a formal model of targeted development. It starts from the assumption that governments in industrialized states seek to maximize their own utility in interactions with developing countries. Development concerns compete with other policy goals for scarce government resources. The level of development resources an industrialized country government targets to a particular developing country depends on the weight the government places on development in that country as well as the efficiency of the country in turning resources into development outcomes that the industrialized state values. One of the key insights of the model is that, as governments work to maximize the utility gained per dollar (or euro, yen, etc.) spent, development motives will influence policy in multiple issue areas. The chapter also draws out implications of the theory for each of the issue areas examined in the empirical chapters.

  PublisherDOI

• Conclusion: Rethinking Development

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2018-06-21

  book1st authorCorresponding

  The evidence throughout the book illustrates that industrialized states view development promotion as a key component in foreign policy. The concluding chapter offers synthesis and considers the potential impact of these findings for related areas of research. The shift toward targeted development implies that there may be changes over time in the effectiveness of development policy. Additionally, it suggests that while development promotion has increased in some countries, those not targeted may find themselves left even further behind. Finally, the desire for targeting calls for a rethinking of the role of multilateral institutions on development issues. It is useful to think of bilateral and multilateral development efforts as complements that can capitalize on the desire for bilateral development promotion while using multilateral channels to provide development assistance that is left off the bilateral foreign policy agenda.

  PublisherDOI

• Preferential Trade Agreements as Development Policy

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2018-06-21

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Preferential access to industrialized country markets can provide an important development opportunity for poorer countries. The targeted development framework suggests that industrialized states will be particularly interested in negotiating such agreements when they value development in a developing state and when the country is in a position to use trade as a catalyst for growth. This chapter analyzes the case of the Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR) to demonstrate the difficulty of understanding the signing of such agreements through traditional political economy explanations and the advantage of incorporating targeted development considerations. It then proceeds to a dyadic analysis of the signing of trade agreements, finding that agreements are more likely with countries where development is a high priority for the industrialized country and those that have reached a sufficient level of development to benefit from preferential market access.

  PublisherDOI

• Reorienting Foreign Aid*

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2018-06-21 · 1 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter applies the theory of targeted development to foreign aid and analyzes bilateral aid allocation from 23 donors to 156 recipient for the period 1973–2012. The targeted development framework predicts that donors will use aid where it can most benefit themselves by decreasing negative spillovers from underdevelopment, and that this concern with spillovers will have grown as globalization has increased. The analysis shows that in the post-2001 period, donors give more aid to nearby countries and to those that are linked to themselves through trade, migration, or historical ties. These countries have an increased likelihood of transmitting spillovers to the donor state. This marks a change from the Cold War period, when non-development considerations were leading determinants of aid policy. The analysis also shows that donors alter the composition of aid based on the quality of governance in a recipient, consistent with an attempt to increase aid effectiveness.

  PublisherDOI

• Development as Self-Interest

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2018-06-21 · 2 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter introduces the role of development as a self-interested policy pursued by industrialized states in an increasingly connected world. As such, it is differentiated from traditional geopolitical accounts of interactions between industrialized and developing states as well as from assertions that the increased focus on development stems from altruistic motivations. The concept of targeted development—pursuing development abroad when and where it serves the interests of the policymaking states—is introduced and defined. The issue areas covered in the book—foreign aid, trade agreements between industrialized and developing countries, and finance for climate change adaptation and mitigation—are introduced. The preference for bilateral, rather than multilateral, action is discussed.

  PublisherDOI

• Climate Finance for Developing Countries

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2018-06-21 · 1 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter analyzes whether the desire of industrialized states to enhance their own well-being through development abroad influences the allocation of resources in areas such as climate finance, where development is not the primary stated purpose of funds. An examination of the early years of climate finance suggests that mitigation and adaptation funds are being diverted to areas where they can provide development benefits to the donor states, rather than being spent where adaptation assistance is most needed or where mitigation resources can most efficiently combat climate change. This targeting helps explain the preference of industrialized states to channel their climate finance bilaterally rather than through newly created multilateral institutions, such as the Green Climate Fund, ostensibly tasked with the distribution of such funds.

  PublisherDOI

• Targeted Development in Perspective

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2018-06-21

  book1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter places the concept of targeted development in historical context, starting with an overview of the time immediately following the end of World War II. Interestingly, the logic for targeted development today has much in common with the decision to target development resources to Europe, rather than the developing world, in the second half of the 1940s. As the Cold War unfolded and the strategy of containment took hold, the chapter demonstrates how development promotion was sidelined in favor of a more direct approach to pursuing geopolitical goals in developing countries. The chapter then traces the rise of interconnections between industrialized and developing countries since the end of the Cold War and the impact of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks for focusing attention on spillovers associated with underdevelopment.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• David Leblang

  University of Virginia

  3 shared

• Susan Hyde

  University of California, San Francisco

  2 shared

• Alastair Lain Johnston

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  2 shared

• Jeffrey T. Checkel

  2 shared

• Jon Pevehouse

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  2 shared

• Osondu Ogbuoji

  Duke Institute for Health Innovation

  2 shared

• Jens Hainmueller

  Stanford University

  2 shared

• Miles Kahler

  2 shared