Is there a connection between the US government's spending in foreign countries and human development? The US government focuses spending on alleviating suffering in struggling countries. This leads to a negative correlation between government spending and quality of life scores as struggling countries will predictably have lower scores. While we could not predict how much worse those scores would be if the US was to cut funding, we can pinpoint countries that are severely lacking and underfunded.
We used two data sets : US Foreign Aid and UN Human Development Reports. The US Foreign Aid data was compiled by the US government and contains the records for foreign aid transactions from 1946 to present. The UN Human Development Reports were compiled by the United Nations and contains metrics on each country’s well-being and quality of life.