Why did some developing country governments accumulate large foreign debt burdens in the late twentieth century while others did not? I hypothesize that variation in foreign indebtedness is a product of the impact of regime type on government borrowing and investment decisions. Autocratic regimes will borrow more from foreign lenders and invest fewer of these funds in public goods than democratic regimes. Consequently, autocracies are more likely to develop large foreign debt burdens than democracies. I test this hypothesis by estimating error correction models against a sample comprising 78 developing countries between 1976 and 1998. The analysis suggests that autocratic governments accumulated substantially larger foreign debt relative to their national income than democratic governments. The analysis has implications for the likely consequences of contemporary debt relief initiatives.

Existing models of international organizations focus on the strategic and commercial interests of major shareholders to explain why some countries secure better deals from international organizations. Focusing on the International Monetary Fund (IMF), we argue that the Fund's major shareholders pressure the IMF to minimize short-term adjustment costs in the borrowing country when they host a large number of the country's nationals. Stringent loan packages often exacerbate short-term economic distress in the borrowing country, which in turn causes more people to migrate to countries where their co-ethnics reside. Analyzing all IMF programs from 1978 to 2014, we assess our hypothesis that IMF borrowers with larger diasporas in the major IMF shareholder countries tend to secure better arrangements from the IMF. Our findings show that when migration pressures on the G5 countries increase, borrowing countries receive larger loan disbursements and fewer conditions.

This dataverse contains the data and supporting documents for the CCES 2014 University of Texas at Dallas. This project was supported by the National Science Foundation, Grant Number SES-1430505.