What Drives the International Development Agenda? An NLP Analysis of the United Nations General Debate 1970-2016

摘要

There is surprisingly little known about agenda setting for internationaldevelopment in the United Nations (UN) despite it having a significantinfluence on the process and outcomes of development efforts. This paperaddresses this shortcoming using a novel approach that applies natural languageprocessing techniques to countries' annual statements in the UN General Debate.Every year UN member states deliver statements during the General Debate ontheir governments' perspective on major issues in world politics. Thesespeeches provide invaluable information on state preferences on a wide range ofissues, including international development, but have largely been overlookedin the study of global politics. This paper identifies the main internationaldevelopment topics that states raise in these speeches between 1970 and 2016,and examine the country-specific drivers of international development rhetoric.