On the same subject, but through a rigorous analysis, Farzin (1991) concludes that “Somalia still depends heavily on imported food, and especially food aid, as a result of donor continuation of illplanned food aid programs”. In fact, Farzin concludes that the insufficient aid organization, combined with a disequilibrium between food aid assistance and little farmer support produced a vicious circle that imprisoned Somalia in a growing dependency. For Cote d’Ivoire, an analysis involving different aid types and savings, Ouattara (2007) finds that “aid tends to worsen Cote d’Ivoire’s dependence”.

Ethiopia is a pretty well researched country, for which we would like to report four studies. The first is an anecdotal report by Salisbury (1992), narrating that Ethiopians remarkably altered their behavior (giving up their work, planting trees upside down), in order to secure the extension of the international food aid programs. These behaviors are totally consistent with our hypothesis and represent a form of “community moral hazard”. The second comes from an interesting householdsurvey study on food aid targeting in Ethiopia, (Clay et al 1999) which reports that there is “no significant association between household food availability (need) and food aid receipts” and recognize that “research is also needed to examine the potential disincentive effects that observed targeting errors may exert”. Another household survey research always on Ethiopia (Jayne et al : 2002) concludes that “the single most important determinant of whether a wereda (county) receives free food or food for work is whether that wereda has been a recipient in previous years. On its face, it is unclear whether historical use should be interpreted as indicating that inertia is determining allocations”. These two conclusions may be consistent with the result implying that in presence of badly targeted aid programs, needless people may react by joining the safety net and dropping work hours, so that it is unsurprising to find that needless individuals receive aid transfers. The last, which somehow, concludes on this case was prepared by Abdulai et al. (2004) stating that “the disincentive effects of food aid on household behaviours are many, large in magnitude and statistically significant. However, when we take into account household characteristics such as age, sex and education of head, land holdings, size and location, many of these adverse effects vanish”.

Sri Lanka’s targeted food stamp program presents a notable example supporting the hypothesis behind this work. In order to replace an old general food subsidy, a pro-poor food stamp program was introduced and, as Sahn and Alderman (1995) discovered, there was a significant and strong reduction in the number of working hours by targeted individuals in order to maintain themselves in the program.

Though the literature in this field is progressively growing, there is still too little stress on rigorously identifying the impacts of aid programs, especially income transfer programs, on key variables like labor supply, private insurance, savings, accumulation and their relation with income distribution. As this model shows, a significant cause of dependency may lie in the decision making of those individuals whom are not treated by the program, but find convenient to join the program by dropping their labor supply. Clearly, because at the moment we do not dispose of 17