ABSTRACT
Ever since McKinlay and Little (1977, 1978a,b,c, 1979) in a series of articles analysed aid allocation by Germany, France, the UK and the US, it has become common in the literature explaining aid allocation to distinguish between variables that control for donor interest (DI) versus recipient need (RN). The simple idea behind this distinction is that donors are likely to be neither entirely altruistic, which is why their aid allocation can be expected to promote their own interest, nor entirely selfish, which is why it can also be expected to be oriented towards the need for aid of recipient countries. This is not to say that McKinlay and Little were the first ones to include such variables in a quantitative analysis of aid allocation, but they can be credited with providing a logical framework to this type of analysis with the help of such categories. Note that the proposition that donor countries promote partially at least their own interest fits well into the realist school of thought within international relations, whereas the idea that donor countries are concerned about the need within recipient countries is rooted in the idealist school of thought of international relations.
