European Aid to Foreign Countries in Emergencies - Are ECHO and the EU Large-Donor Countries on the Same Track?

The paper analyses financial aid given by the richest countries of the European Union and by ECHO (European Commission's Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection department) to six geographical groups of countries. It aims at advancing existing knowledge about the relevance of enabling conditions and the importance of general interest and self-interest to emergency aid. In political science, explanation focuses on economic power and political interest as, respectively, the enabling condition and the contingent reason for aid. The paper analyses the ECHO/EDRIS dataset which weakly supports the enabling conditions explanation and disconfirms the geopolitical interest explanation. The large similarity of the data of the emergency aid policies of the most rich EU MSs requests further study about the EU countries' preference for funding assistance directly to a larger extent than through the EU's programs, and about keeping foreign assistance as shared competence in the EU system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]