International Financial Institutions and the Promotion of Autocratic Resilience

International financial institutions (IFIs) are often perceived as engines of economic and political liberalization. Yet, despite their outsized influence in shaping the development trajectories of recipient nations, the lending strategies of IFIs dominated by authoritarian regimes remain under-explored. In this working paper, Christina Cottiero, an assistant professor at the University of Utah, and Christina Schneider, a professor at UC San Diego, argue that autocratic IFIs are not merely neutral economic actors; rather, they strategically allocate aid to reinforce authoritarian resilience. Their analysis reveals that these institutions disproportionately channel funds to authoritarian governments confronting acute domestic or international challenges to their rule, such as coup risk, political conflict, or democratic mobilization.

By introducing an original dataset tracking the lending behavior of 20 autocratic IFIs across 143 recipient countries from 1967–2021, Cottiero and Schneider uncover a striking pattern: aid flows from autocratic IFIs increase precisely when authoritarian regimes are most vulnerable. By situating these insights within the broader aid allocation literature, the authors provide a fresh perspective on the political calculus of international development lending, with profound implications for understanding global power dynamics.

Thumbnail credit: Asian Development Bank (Flickr)