Title: What Drives the International Development Agenda? An NLP Analysis of the United Nations General Debate 1970-2016,
Abstract: There is surprisingly little known about agenda setting for international
development in the United Nations (UN) despite it having a significant
influence on the process and outcomes of development efforts. This paper
addresses this shortcoming using a novel approach that applies natural language
processing techniques to countries' annual statements in the UN General Debate.
Every year UN member states deliver statements during the General Debate on
their governments' perspective on major issues in world politics. These
speeches provide invaluable information on state preferences on a wide range of
issues, including international development, but have largely been overlooked
in the study of global politics. This paper identifies the main international
development topics that states raise in these speeches between 1970 and 2016,
and examine the country-specific drivers of international development rhetoric.