Human Rights Treaty Ratification of Aid Receiving Countries

This paper studies the decision to ratify United Nations Human Rights Treaties (HRT). We present new empirical evidence that sheds light on who ratifies when and why. For a foreign aid receiving country, high levels of predetermined treaty participation relative to other aid recipients has a significant positive effect on foreign aid receipts. We further find that countries with good human rights practices are more likely to participate in HRTs than countries with bad practices, but that the converse is not true. Countries that participate frequently have worse human rights practices than countries who participate less frequently. Furthermore, previous ratifications have a strong negative effect on the country's current ratification decision. This evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that aid donors use HRT ratification as a criterion to allocate foreign aid, and that recipient countries are strategic and forward-looking. Based on these empirical findings, we propose a structural dynamic game of HRT ratification. The model is analogous to a dynamic game of quality competition in an oligopoly industry (eg., Pakes and McGuire, 1994) in which countries compete for foreign aid by ratifying costly HRTs in the same way firms compete for demand by investing in costly product quality improvement. We estimate the model using data from a variety of sources, including the United Nations Treaty Collection. Our estimates show that economic factors play an important role in HRT ratification, and that HRTs have significant influence on the distribution of foreign aid among recipient countries. We also find that the ratification costs countries incur vary significantly across treaties and country regime types. We use the estimated model to evaluate the effects of counterfactual policies on HRT ratification decisions, human rights behavior, and on the distribution of foreign aid.