The Model of French Development Assistance - Who Gets the Help? **

Development cooperation is an important element of international relations because it influences the power balance between major players on the world markets and in the political debate. The aim of the article was to analyze the French development assistance model based upon the amount of help sent to Africa over the period 2001-2012. The motivation of donor country is a crucial factor of development assistance, which influence not only the relations between donors and recipients, but also the effectiveness of aid. We estimated a series of dynamic panel models to assess whether the poverty-related factors play a dominant role in the distribution of help. On the contrary, we found that the most important variables appeared to be the political and economic dependencies, among others: colonial history and oil/gas reserves.