We expect this phenomenon of disproportionate lending to Muslim countries to be
particularly acute in the post-Cold War era, where foreign aid is no longer needed to prop up
anti-communist regimes. Although foreign aid was clearly given for strategic reasons during the
Cold War, the strategies of Europe and all other Western nations changed following the breakup
of the Soviet Union. Foreign aid is no longer needed as a bulwark against the spread of
communism and can now be used to achieve other goals.
Methods
Using data from the PLAID database, a collaboration between Brigham Young
University and the College of William & Mary, we have assembled a dataset containing all
bilateral foreign aid from European members of the OECD (Austria, Belgium, Denmark,
Finland, France, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland,
United Kingdom, Germany, Greece and Luxembourg) during the years 1980 to 2000.
these data, we generated a variable indicating the total bilateral aid each country has received
from European donors during this time period. We obtained our data on religious demographics
from the World Christian Database, which provides both the total population in a given country
and the percentage of the overall population for over fifteen major world religions.
obtained our controls from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators databank.
As a variant measure for our key independent variable, we used the religious data from
the World Christian Encyclopedia to generate a new variable indicating whether more than 50%
17
Although PLAID is not yet publicly available, the site can be found on the web at
www.wm.edu/plaid
18
The World Christian Database is produced by the Center for the Study of Global Christianity
at the Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and is available online at
http://worldchristiandatabase.org/wcd/home.asp
19
The World Development Indicators is available online at
http://devdata.worldbank.org/dataonline/
Convention