Historical aspects of the formation of the American institutional architecture for development assistance: dependency traps in the system of economic diplomacy

Abstract

The aim of this article is to provide a systemic analysis of the American institutional architecture of development assistance, formed over six decades in three successive waves, and to substantiate the thesis that this architecture has not eliminated but merely modified the classical dependency trap. The hypothesis is that if in the 1960s–1980s dependency concerned the volume of aid, then in the 2000s–2020s it has been transformed into dependency on a particular model of the donor paradigm, which narrows the negotiating space of the partner country in its choice between the Western and the non-Western, primarily Chinese, alternatives.