Addressing vaccine hesitancy in developing countries: Survey and experimental evidence.

Vaccine hesitancy is proving to be a significant impediment to COVID-19 vaccination campaigns in some developing countries. This study focuses on vaccine hesitancy and means of reducing it. Data come from a large, representative phone survey and online randomized survey experiment, both run in Papua New Guinea, a developing country with low vaccination rates. Less than 20% of relevant respondents to the phone survey were willing to be vaccinated, primarily because of fear of side effects and low trust in the vaccine. Although vaccine hesitancy was high in the online experiment, participants who received a message emphasizing that the vaccine was safe and COVID-19 dangerous were 68% more likely to state they planned to be vaccinated than those in the control group. A message appealing to social norms was also effective in reducing vaccine hesitancy, although its efficacy was limited to certain types of people.

Why are aid projects less effective in the Pacific?

Motivation: The Pacific is the world's most aid-dependent region, yet available data suggest aid projects are less effective on average in the Pacific than elsewhere in the developing world. Purpose: This article examines the most likely explanations for lower aid project effectiveness in the Pacific. Explanations include poor governance, restricted levels of political freedom, poor economic performance, isolation, and small populations. Methods and approach: Three approaches to causal mediation analysis are used to identify which explanatory variables best explain why aid projects are less effective in the Pacific. Aid project effectiveness data come from a multi-donor dataset of individual aid projects. Data on potential explanatory variables comes from a range of international datasets. Findings: All three causal mediation approaches point to the isolation of many Pacific countries, alongside comparatively small populations, as being the main impediments to project effectiveness. These findings hold even with a suite of project traits being controlled for and within an analysis in which all the key country variables of interest are controlled for. Policy implications: Project effectiveness in the Pacific appears to be primarily constrained by variables that cannot themselves be shifted (the region's countries cannot readily be made less remote or more populous). Improved project effectiveness in the Pacific will require donor practice to carefully adapt to the region's context. A structured process of donor learning will be needed.

Aid fragmentation and volatility in the Pacific.

In this article we comprehensively document aid volatility (short-term changes in aid flows) and aid fragmentation in the Pacific. We study two types of fragmentation: fragmentation across countries and fragmentation across projects. Our research draws on a new dataset compiled by the Lowy Institute. The dataset includes aid flows to the Pacific from non-traditional donors such as China. This allows us to undertake the first-ever study of Pacific aid volatility and fragmentation factoring in non-traditional donors. We contrast the Pacific with other regions, finding that while fragmentation across donors is less in the Pacific, project fragmentation is worse, as is aid volatility. We find fragmentation across donors is increasing in the Pacific. We find a similar trend for fragmentation across projects. We find no evidence that non-traditional donors such as China are driving these trends. However, we find some evidence that non-traditional donors give more volatile aid.

Australian aid projects: What works, where projects work and how Australia compares.

In this article, we conduct the first-ever systematic study of Australian aid project appraisals. Using a previously unstudied data set of appraisals, we study project and recipient country factors influencing Australian aid effectiveness. We find effectiveness varies more within recipient countries than between countries. We find larger projects are more likely to be successful. Humanitarian projects are more successful on average than development projects. We also find that Australian aid is less likely to succeed in the Pacific than elsewhere, a significant finding given Australia's increased focus on the region. Finally, we show that Australia does not appear to be an unusual donor: when we compare Australia with other donors in a global data set, we find similar variables are correlated with effectiveness for most donors, including Australia.

Can Information Change Public Support for Aid?

Donor country publics typically know little about how much aid their governments give. This paper reports on three experiments conducted in Australia designed to study whether providing accurate information on government giving changes people's views about aid. Treating participants by showing them how little Australia gives or by showing declining generosity has little effect. However, contrasting Australian aid cuts with increases in the United Kingdom raises support for aid substantially. Motivated reasoning likely explains the broad absence of findings in the first two treatments. Concern with international norms and perceptions likely explains the efficacy of the third treatment.

Aid Policy and Australian Public Opinion.

Since 2013, Australian aid has been reduced and increasingly focused on delivering benefits to Australia. Motivated by these changes, this paper fills three gaps in the existing literature on public opinion about aid. It provides the only recent detailed study of Australians' opinions about aid. It studies specific policy questions in addition to the broader questions typical of international research. And it studies views on the purpose of aid, an area not previously researched. Although Australians are generally supportive of aid, most backed major aid cuts in 2015. However, most Australians think the purpose of Australian aid should be helping people in poor countries, not bringing benefits to Australia. There is a clear left-right divide in responses to all questions; however, some variables correlated with support for aid fail to explain variation in views about aid's purpose. The paper concludes by discussing ramifications for those who seek to change aid policy.

The clientelism trap in Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea, and its impact on aid policy.

Clientelism is a central feature of politics in Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea. Most voters vote in search of personalized or localized benefit, and most politicians focus on delivering benefits to their supporters at the expense of national governance. In this article, I explain how clientelism impedes development in both countries. I then describe underdevelopment's role in causing clientelism. I also explain the resulting trap: clientelism causes underdevelopment, and underdevelopment causes clientelism. Because of the trap, clientelism will shape the two countries' politics for the foreseeable future. However, the history of other countries gives cause to believe it can be overcome in the long-run. In the second half of the paper, I explain how change may occur. I also outline implications for aid policy, looking at how clientelism constrains the impact aid can have, and explaining how donors can act to maximize their impact in a difficult environment.

Gauging Change in Australian Aid: Stakeholder Perceptions of the Government Aid Program.

In this article, we use data from the 2013 and 2015 Australian Aid Stakeholder Surveys to gauge the extent of the changes to the Australian Government Aid Program since the 2013 federal election. The two surveys targeted the same set of stakeholders of the aid program, and both gathered data on a wide range of aspects of its functioning. As we assess the findings that emerged from the surveys, we situate our work amongst recent academic studies that have looked at the post-2013 aid changes in Australia. Our key findings are that the post-2013 changes to Australian aid have had wide-ranging impacts and have led to deteriorating overall aid quality. However, changes have not affected all aspects of the aid program equally, and some changes are starting to be reversed. In discussion, we examine what these developments mean for the future of Australian aid.

Plate-based diversity subset screening: an efficient paradigm for high throughput screening of a large screening file.

The screening files of many large companies, including Pfizer, have grown considerably due to internal chemistry efforts, company mergers and acquisitions, external contracted synthesis, or compound purchase schemes. In order to screen the targets of interest in a cost-effective fashion, we devised an easy-to-assemble, plate-based diversity subset (PBDS) that represents almost the entire computed chemical space of the screening file whilst comprising only a fraction of the plates in the collection. In order to create this file, we developed new design principles for the quality assessment of screening plates: the Rule of 40 (Ro40) and a plate selection process that insured excellent coverage of both library chemistry and legacy chemistry space. This paper describes the rationale, design, construction, and performance of the PBDS, that has evolved into the standard paradigm for singleton (one compound per well) high-throughput screening in Pfizer since its introduction in 2006.

Shaping a screening file for maximal lead discovery efficiency and effectiveness: elimination of molecular redundancy.

High Throughput Screening (HTS) is a successful strategy for finding hits and leads that have the opportunity to be converted into drugs. In this paper we highlight novel computational methods used to select compounds to build a new screening file at Pfizer and the analytical methods we used to assess their quality. We also introduce the novel concept of molecular redundancy to help decide on the density of compounds required in any region of chemical space in order to be confident of running successful HTS campaigns.