The Politics of Foreign Aid

southsiderosie

NOTE: There has been a lot of debate about this lately, and I think it is a topic worth discussing - in a calm, RATIONAL way. I'm hoping (against hope) that this thread will not descend into the usual hysterics.

Should the West provide direct aid to poor countries? If so, how? If not, what if anything could - or should - the West do to alleviate poverty in the developing world?

In terms of policy advocates, the "Yes to aid" camp is led by Jeffrey Sachs, whose book "The End of Poverty" was a best seller. Notably, Bono wrote the introduction. This camp claims that poverty in the developing world is a matter of spending, and if the West would spend a bit more, them global poverty could be erased.

The "NO to aid" camp is led by William Easterly, who has written two very interesting books on the subject: "The Elusive Quest for Growth" which gives a good overview of a half-century of development economics and policy, and "The White Man's Burden", which is a more scathing critique of the kinds of aid programs that Sachs/Bono/Geldof & Co. push for. Easterly notes that most of what the West has done hasn't worked, and instead of grand schemes, we would be better off focusing on targeted, specific grass-roots projects (that still may be doomed to fail).

I will admit that I am definitely more in the Easterly camp. First, I think that local people understand better than outsiders - or even their governments - what local needs are. Secondly, government to government assistance just seems like a black hole of waste and corruption, and it simply frees up money for receiving governments to spend on war and/or patronage. The data tables on aid spending and development outcomes in "The Elusive Quest for Growth" are particularly damning.

Ultimately, if Western governments are going to get involved in aid projects, then at best they should focus on infrastructure upgrading - roads, sewage lines, ports, etc. - that could help poor countries build up their internal markets and better facilitate commerce and trade (and access to health and other public services). Governments can also play a role in identifying good grassroots organizations that citizens can send direct donations to. But ultimately I think that billions of dollars have been wasted, and unfortunately under the current advocate-driven system of "mo' money = less problems" it will continue to go to waste.

pablomakaveli

A lot of aid seems to be mismanaged and there really should be more control over what it is used for. I think keeping the aid out of the hands of the governments of the receiving countries and having neutral group in charge of allocating aid to worthy projects is a must.

Ultimately the aid should be used for projects that will help the locals to eventually help themselves. So areas like education and developing infrastructure would be more worthy projects than stop-gap solutions like distributing food to poor people.

It might take years even decades to reap the rewards but it is the best way in the long term.

Nodin

.....very quiet thread....the "rational" in caps must have scared them off....

cavedave

southsiderosie

Should the West provide direct aid to poor countries?

There are two types of aid. There is the long term aid where you build schools and drill wells and such. And there is the hurricane has knocked down your house emergency aid stuff.

I would like that the first kind works. But the evidence is not great that it does. With the exception of vaccines and other medical care for young children.

I believe the second kind to be useful. This would include famine relief like in Somalia.

Dob74

Money breds corruption, the lack of transperency when it comes to finanical matters in this country is disgraceful. Charities dont have to publish detailed accounts so god only knows where the money goes.
There seems to be alot high profile well paid professional beggers at he top of our charities. Lining there own pockets is what there good at, not helping the poor.

RMD

In my view a country's priority should be it's own citizens before the citizens of other countries. We're spending huge money on foreign aid, yet there's very little money donated to many Irish charities in comparison. I think it's wrong that the citizens of another country are prioritized before our own. The money spent on foreign aid could be spent on maintaining SNA's numbers in education, improving the healthcare system or dealing with the problem of homelessness in Ireland to mention a very small number of needy causes.

southsiderosie

pablomakaveli wrote: »

Ultimately the aid should be used for projects that will help the locals to eventually help themselves. So areas like education and developing infrastructure would be more worthy projects than stop-gap solutions like distributing food to poor people.

So do you think that Western countries should refuse to give food aid to ease the current drought/famine conditions in East Africa?

RMD wrote: »

In my view a country's priority should be it's own citizens before the citizens of other countries. We're spending huge money on foreign aid, yet there's very little money donated to many Irish charities in comparison. I think it's wrong that the citizens of another country are prioritized before our own. The money spent on foreign aid could be spent on maintaining SNA's numbers in education, improving the healthcare system or dealing with the problem of homelessness in Ireland to mention a very small number of needy causes.

But Ireland has a welfare state which already does what a lot of foreign aid tries to do. It also has roads, ports, and schools. Can you really claim that foreigners are getting 'priority' over Irish people given that the VAST majority of Irish tax dollars are spent on the Irish people (or debt assumed by the Irish government)? I think that is a stretch - at best.

pablomakaveli

southsiderosie wrote: »

So do you think that Western countries should refuse to give food aid to ease the current drought/famine conditions in East Africa?

Not in an emergency situation like the current drought no. But when the emergency is over it's better to focus on development to ensure the people there will be better equipped to be successful on their own rather then being dependent on aid long into the future.

Nodin

RMD wrote: »

...... We're spending huge money on foreign aid, yet there's very little money donated to many Irish charities in comparison..

You've some numbers on this?

RMD wrote: »

......
I think it's wrong that the citizens of another country are prioritized before our own........

They aren't.

RMD

Nodin wrote: »

You've some numbers on this?

671.4 Million euro was donated in foreign aid last year. Yet while we do this, we have huge waiting lists in hospitals, cuts in education and an undermanned police force with overcrowded prisons. In the grand scheme of things 671 Million isn't a large number, but it's more than enough to make a difference to a lot of people's lives here.

If people wish to donate privately they are able too (I do), but I don't think the taxpayers money should be donated to foreign countries when we still have problems here.

Nodin

RMD wrote: »

671.4 Million euro was donated in foreign aid last year. Yet while we do this, we have huge waiting lists in hospitals, cuts in education and an undermanned police force with overcrowded prisons. In the grand scheme of things 671 Million isn't a large number, but it's more than enough to make a difference to a lot of people's lives here.

If people wish to donate privately they are able too (I do), but I don't think the taxpayers money should be donated to foreign countries when we still have problems here.

You seem to be confusing public (state) money with public charitable donations. The Irish Social Welfare Budget alone is approximately 20 Billion Euro. Health is approximately 15 Billion. Thus the idea that "we're spending huge money on foreign aid, yet there's very little money donated to many Irish charities in comparison" doesn't stand up to any scrutiny.

Secondly, its far from a straight choice between giving/cutting Foriegn Aid or internal aid. The Government still subsidises fee paying schools, for instance. Theres still the question of the very large fees paid to a small percentage at the top of the civil service, bankers bonuses now that those are state owned........all of these could stand a bit of scrutiny and no lives put at risk as a result.

Cannibal Ox

This is a very long post.

Aid and development are complicated. Very, very, very complicated. You can read the entire history of the West in development, from economic doctrines, to political ideologies, to social programs. And, despite the best efforts of countless governments, several Nobel prize winners, billions upon billions and almost every academic discipline, we haven't quite gotten it right.

Sometimes, development is thought about as being the process through which a country is brought up to the standards of a modern, Western state through aid. That means the establishment of a bureaucracy, of democratic institutions and processes, of health and education institutions, of infrastructure and of a private sector.

The idea is that you can lift a country out of its current predicament, one normally lacking all of the above and involving high levels of poverty, to an ideal standard.

This sounds simple as an idea, but it has so many problems it isn't funny. For decades the idea that you could transfer the Western model to a non-Western country drove some discourses on development. This doesn't seem to work.

Think about education. The education system in Ireland has a particular history and context, and is, these days, linked very closely to the economic needs of the state. If you took the education system as it exists right now and tried to transfer it to Rwanda, you would be transplanting a whole system with its own particular history and development onto an entirely different country with its own history, development and culture.

Thats a crude example, and this is a crude summary, but someone like Easterly would argue that you need to develop an education system from the ground up, particular to the country and according to how it has developed, whereas Sachs would be closer to a universal model that can be applied to any country regardless of the particularities of a country.

This example is more theoretical then practical, although it is very important and touches on some other theoretical issues that affect development processes.

Something more practical. UNICEF has a program called Child Friendly Schools. This program, alongside a Human Rights approach, guides UNICEFs education policies in different countries.

The program itself is really basic stuff. We're talking toilets, roofs, desks, reading materials and gender specific policies (like...girls have their own toilets).

UNICEF won't just march in and apply this program wholesale in a country. It will work with the government and try to ensure that it's education policy corresponds to their education policy.

This kind of mixes both approaches outlined above, in that it tries to be sensitive to the particular nature of a country, while also taking a larger ideal of a system.

But it still doesn't always work.

You need the government to work with you and you need the funds to carry out the work. You need to develop an entire education system, from the syllabus, to producing qualified teachers, to building schools. You need to change the lives and cultures of different groups of people. You need to convince them that they'd be better off sending their kids (boys and girls) to school rather then working with them, despite the fact that education doesn't always seem to have great outcomes.

Those are some problems you might encounter. Each one of those problems has a hundred problems, both practical and theoretical, within them.

For example, even if you convince a family to send their kids to school, you have to convince them about how long to send them to school for, about how many kids they should send, and about how many hours a day they should send them.

It might seem obvious to us to send them, but for a family that relies on their kids to work with them, that might not have any money to buy books, clothes or bags, and that might not see (sometimes rightly) the economic incentive for education, it isn't so obvious.

I've been in places where, to my eye, there is literally nothing. For miles and miles and miles. And yet, people are still there and they're surviving and living. I've been completely and utterly stumped at how you could even begin the process of development in these kinds of places. But I've also seen it done, and done with some success.



That's all crude again. I hate writing about this because it is incredibly complicated. I think that only people who've been involved closely with development for some time can talk with any kind of authority about it. Even then it needs to be talked about in detail with reference to particular contexts.

My own, totally unprofessional, view would be that development and aid need to be particular, they need to come from the ground up, need to be sensitive to the environment, need to be led by local people, and needs to, for lack of a better word, evolve out of the country rather then imposed on it.

It can work in some cases, but it hasn't worked in all cases, and I'm skeptical that it ever will work for everybody. The problem, when you get right down to it, is the entire system/s, practical and theoretical, that the human world operates along.

southsiderosie

I don't disagree with much of what you are saying, but this still leaves the issue of should wealthy countries get involved with the aid process? At some point, it seems like governments of developing countries needs to care more about the living situation of their citizens than foreigners do.

Over the last decade, both Mexico and Brazil have implemented really innovative programs to reduce child hunger and keep kids in school. They were able to do this in part because of energy revenues - and despite legacies of horrible corruption which still have not fully been resolved. Yet in countries like Equatorial Guinea and Angola, the governments spend oil revenues on white elephant projects or filter them into Swiss bank accounts. Where is the African version of Lula?

The other sad aspect of all of this is that if you look at work by development economists and modernization theorists in the 1960s, they were gung-ho on places like Ghana and Lebanon. Most of Southeast Asia did not even warrant a look-in, and South Korea and Singapore were poorer than many West African and Caribbean countries. Yet today they rival Western democracies in terms of GDP/capita, social outcomes, etc. The difference here does not seem to be resources, but rather determined leadership and a relative lack of corruption. Trade and advances in agriculture also played a big role, and that's where I think the West needs to focus its attention, not on stopgap measures and government payments.

Cannibal Ox

I don't disagree with much of what you are saying, but this still leaves the issue of should wealthy countries get involved with the aid process?

I suppose this is about measures and outcomes.

The US is the largest aid funder of Ethiopia. In the last election, 2010, Meles party won more then 90% of the vote. In 2007 the US was backing the Ethiopian army in their invasion of Somalia. The government in Ethiopia has been consistently accused of human rights violations and of ruling through fear and intimidation. The US does not consider this a problem.

My point, aid is not outside strategic relations. The UK, the US, China, as examples, don't measure the outcome of aid based solely on child mortality rates, life expectancy, literacy or corruption levels. They measure it according to their own strategic interests.

In other words, many wealthy countries are happy funding dictators and their armies as long as it serves their interests.

For a country like Ireland, where we aren't so much interested in geopolitical strategies, the outcome is surely things like child mortality rates, life expectancy, literacy, and all of these things, very generally, have gotten better over the past fifty years. But, in all honesty, you would need to take a closer look at countries NGOs and Irish Aid operate in, and the particular programs they operate, to measure the success of their outcomes.

I would say that Irish Aid and Irish NGOs have an excellent record internationally and Irish aid workers have an excellent reputation internationally. They do an excellent job working in often difficult conditions. They don't get this record or reputation because they're funding crappy programs.

If the measure is a moral one, it's pretty much open and shut as far as I'm concerned.

Summing that up, wealthy countries will get involved in aid and development regardless of most outcomes because it serves their own interests. Ireland should get involved because it's morally right, we can afford to do it, and we are very good at it.

That raises the question of how, and to be honest, I'm really not qualified to answer that beyond what I said in the last post.


This is long enough without getting to much into the rest of it I think :pac: As for Angola and Brazil...well...Angola only came out of a civil war in 2002 that had lasted for decades and most, if not all of the oil, is owned by private companies and individuals. It also has a HUGE amount of not always benign foreign interests because of its mineral deposits. So I'm not sure the comparison would be helpful in regards to education schemes.

And asking where Lulu is in Africa, I don't think that helps either. There's the famous example of life expectancy, in the Democratic Republic of Congo is 48, the life expectancy in Cape Verde is 61. Think of the difference between South Africa and Eritrea or Benin, or even the difference within South Africa between different regions. Generalising, without paying attention to those particular contexts, glosses over most of what causes problems and difficulties. African Lulu, for example, could've been arrested in Ethiopia along with most of the prominent opposition members in 2010 but set free in South Africa sometime around 1990.

The difference here does not seem to be resources, but rather determined leadership and a relative lack of corruption. Trade and advances in agriculture also played a big role, and that's where I think the West needs to focus its attention, not on stopgap measures and government payments.

South Korea ranks lower then Botswana and Brazil ranks lower then Botswana, Mauritius, Rwanda, South Africa and Ghana on Transparancy International's Corruption Index. The World Bank ranks Angola(75%), the DRC (63%), Ethiopia (33%) ahead of Brazil (18%) in terms of Private Sector (measured by the % of GDP of merchandise trade). An awful lot of land is being bought up by foreign governments in African countries. South Korea for example owns about 1.7 million acres of Sudan so they can grow wheat to feed their own population. Anyone who says that say, Libya, i.e, the former African King of Kings, lacks a determined leader, is probably...a bit crazy.

That's all a bit shorthand, but otherwise this'd end up as a thesis. So I'll stop there.

edanto

I agree with all of Cannibal Ox above and just want to bring in another angle which is the difference between political change and humanitarian work.

Right now in the Horn of Africa, there are literally millions of people in danger of starving to death. In some areas there has been no rain for 2-3 years. We, as a country, have an ability to do something about this by funding and delivering aid, and personally I think we ought to.

The reasons for the situation are complex - serious drought is increasing from a previous level of once per decade, to the current situation of once per 3 years on average. Food prices are increasing tremendously, linked to global fuel costs.

In Ethiopia, huge numbers of people are affected. Several hundred probably died today. Yet, 6 weeks ago, it was announced that the Ethiopian government was spending $100m on tanks. It's mind boggling that they would make that choice even though it was well known that this famine was coming, when the rains didn't arrive last autumn.

But if an aid agency comes out and publicly and criticises the government in Ethiopia, they are likely to be thrown out of the country - as happend to MSF in 1985.

So, the aid agencies working there today have a stark choice. Do they risk being thrown out by publicly highlighting the failings and bad decisions of the government, or do they keep their heads down and continue to truck in as much food, water and shelter as they can, knowing that they are literally saving people's lives.

In Somalia, there isn't a functioning government to co-ordinate things. There are negotiations with various militias, and it's impossible to predict which aid projects the militias will allow week by week - all the while people are suffering.

Of course the aid agencies would like a better political situation in those countries, a more stable government and secure enviroment. But the facts remain that people are suffering and we have the ability to do something about it.

For me, that is a key realisation. We have to push on with this humanitarian work even though the political context is distasteful. This work is urgent, and imporatant.

We are far, far richer that most people in Ireland realise. I've taken to asking people to guess Ireland's position on the HDI list - where the 169 countries are ranked based on life expectancy, access to knowledge and wealth. Most people I've asked guess that Ireland is about 20th, or lower on that list. One woman even guessed 60th.

The thing is that we are 5th. http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/

We can spare 3 quarters of a billion in overseas aid. Better than giving it to the damn bankers.

Count Dooku

edanto wrote: »

Right now in the Horn of Africa, there are literally millions of people in danger of starving to death.

Mostly fault of foreign aid, which pushed population to levels which agricultural infrastructure cannot maintain

edanto wrote: »

We are far, far richer that most people in Ireland realise. I've taken to asking people to guess Ireland's position on the HDI list - where the 169 countries are ranked based on life expectancy, access to knowledge and wealth. Most people I've asked guess that Ireland is about 20th, or lower on that list. One woman even guessed 60th.

The thing is that we are 5th. http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/

Only because we owe per capita more then anybody in the world
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_external_debt

edanto wrote: »

We can spare 3 quarters of a billion in overseas aid. Better than giving it to the damn bankers.

Lets stop paying damn bankers and money for wasting on overseas aid will disappear itself

Count Dooku

Cannibal Ox wrote: »

Aid and development are complicated. Very, very, very complicated.

Of coarse it is very complicated to present total failure as minor success
For example, Somalis would much better without foreign aid as Somaliland just proofed it
While Somalia stagnates, Somaliland flourishes

As Somalia descends into yet another of the troughs of violence and famine that have marked this ultimate failed state for 20 years, just over its northern horizon is one of the most successful new countries in Africa.

Somaliland broke away from Somalia after the old dictator, Siad Barre, was ousted by clan warlords at the end of January 1991, and has since quietly constructed a robust, functioning state that is also the only vibrant Islamic democracy in the broader region of North Africa and the Middle East.

But Somaliland is not recognized internationally as an independent nation, which may, perversely, largely account for its success.

The country’s 3.5 million people and its large diaspora of exiles and emigrants in Europe, North America and the Gulf States have had to rely on their own resources and are immensely proud of their accomplishments.

Non-recognition also means they have been spared the manipulative outside interference that has often only made matters worse in Somalia to the south.

edanto

I am similarly perplexed as to why Somaliland has not been recognised, they seem to be doing relatively well. However, it's a very twisted logic to think that the reason they are doing well is because they haven't been receiving aid.

The article you linked to made it clear that Somaliland has been doing well because it is politically stable. It's very misleading for you to try and use that article to support your position that aid is bad.

I don't think you have any idea of the scale of the problem in Somalia - here's a graph which I think is more informative and less tabloid than the one above.


It shows Deaths per 100 people, per month, selected events.

And comes from http://www.ronanlyons.com/2011/07/26/the-world-economys-most-pressing-problem

Why should we help these people? Because we can.

edanto

Count Dooku wrote: »

Only because we owe per capita more then anybody in the world
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_external_debt

Just to repeat, the HDI is not solely based on economic metrics, but also on access to education and health. We're still 5th.

sarkozy

Thanks to the thread-starter to call for a sane, balanced discussion on the subject.

I'd have to reiterate what Cannibal Ox said on the previous page. I worked in government-to-government aid in a southern African country for a year and a half. It's an incredibly complex thing with all kinds of unhelpful as much as intuitively correct comments being made on all sides. I can't even begin to sum up the issues, but maybe I can reflect some my first-hand experience.

Government-to-government aid, as one form, is highly complex. Think about support to any developing country's health sector. A donor agrees a funding project or programme with a recipient ministry; commitments are made on both sides and some actions are undertaken. In any developing country, health delivery is complex as is our own health system. That health ministry may have other commitments with other donors in addition to commitments made by the government, and these may or may not be contradictory. Imagine committing, for example, to increase the deployment of HIV & AIDS specialists to remote rural clinics to serve large, dispersed populations; a problem may arise whereby the money is provided but the country suffers a drain of trained medics to Western countries where they can provide cheap health services to the rich. Or perhaps the ministry's financial or human resource systems aren't responsive enough to need because of a lack of financing or poor governance, impeding the achievement of concrete health outcomes like the reduction in child mortality. To a casual reader, this may seem all very abstract, but it's a suggestion of the complexities in all this.

Looking at education, I saw how the Ministry of Education was assisted by donors in developing curriculums for primary and secondary school and how financing went to the construction of schools and feeding programmes to keep kids in school and fight malnutrition so they could learn better. Yes, in part, this was pushed by some donors; at the same time, well-intentioned, hard-working Africans simply did not know how to practically work towards achieving the education Millennium Development Goal - the challenges were not only about building schools, supplying textbooks, the challenges included training teachers, treating teachers sick with HIV, feeding poor students and getting excluded children (orphans, etc.) into school by challenging stigma and social customs. By working together, the official donors, government and civil society developed an integrated education curriculum which is seriously contributing to this country achieving this millennium development goal.

But as always, there are problems with development. These positive stories also are accompanied by negative ones; I saw how programmes would be designed and foisted upon countries with more regard for the organisation's own internal performance targets than for the country itself. I saw how, in the agriculture sector, for example, how the same tired solutions would be repackaged without taking seriously the unique national and regional political-economic and cultural context. In particular, I mean some UN agencies.

I also saw how domestic political concerns of donor country governments (e.g. the US) outweighed those of the recipient country. But I also saw how well-intentioned donors became unintentionally embroiled in domestic political games and power plays, in my opinion, an inevitable outcome which shouldn't mean cut all aid.

Right now, there's a lot of work being done to improve aid. Some is very critical and progressive, some is technocratic and ineffective. But Ireland is leading the way. Irish Aid is far ahead in relation to other government donors in 'Aid Effectiveness', which includes holding itself to account for identifying and measuring performance on concrete development 'outcomes'; other aid effectiveness commitments include mutual accountability between donors and recipient governments, partnership, donors working together better, etc. Irish NGOs just recently got a set of 'Development Effectiveness' principles agreed in Cambodia; at this global conference, over 250 delegates representing the world's development NGOs agreed to a set of NGO principles to improve what they do and how they do it. Standard setting can make a difference.

In all my NGO and government work, I have personally tried to retain a commitment to remaining objective and critical of everything I do. I think many aid workers in NGOs do the same, not all; equally, there are some terrible people working in the UN and government aid agencies, careerists, but then there are those inspirational people who try to change things despite the obstacles. On the outside we tend to see institutions and systems; on the inside of those, we see people.

Finally, I'd like to make a comment on how the thread starter characterises the debate on aid: there are the pro- and anti-aid people. Firstly, this is a simplification and I personally would neither subscribe to the Sachsian or Easterlian view (also I think 'Dead Aid' by Dambisa Moyo is a terrible book). On Jeffrey Sachs, I've just returned from travelling in Latin America; on that trip, I re-read Naomi Klein's 'The Shock Doctrine' and Sachs' role in designing Bolivia's 'economic transformation' in the 1980s; his theories plunged the population into misery. By his own admission at that time, Sachs knew little about development economics but 'nearly everything there was to know about inflation'. Well, to many in Bolivia, his name is on a par with El Diablo. I would be very careful characterising the debate in such simplistic terms. Moreover, Easterly has been robustly critiqued in a number of books and journal articles.

Nonetheless, there are major, complex and deep questions to be asked about the whole 'aid thing'.

Count Dooku

edanto wrote: »

Just to repeat, the HDI is not solely based on economic metrics, but also on access to education and health. We're still 5th.

Based on data from 2008

jmayo

pablomakaveli wrote: »

A lot of aid seems to be mismanaged and there really should be more control over what it is used for. I think keeping the aid out of the hands of the governments of the receiving countries and having neutral group in charge of allocating aid to worthy projects is a must.

Would be great if possible, but being realistic how would it work ?

pablomakaveli wrote: »

Ultimately the aid should be used for projects that will help the locals to eventually help themselves. So areas like education and developing infrastructure would be more worthy projects than stop-gap solutions like distributing food to poor people.

It might take years even decades to reap the rewards but it is the best way in the long term.

Very true, but every few years there is another emergency where millions are in danger of dying so aid is fired in just to keep people alive.
You can't tell people that you are digging wells and building irrigation channels
so they can feed themselves in 3/4 years when they are starving at the moment.

southsiderosie wrote: »

I don't disagree with much of what you are saying, but this still leaves the issue of should wealthy countries get involved with the aid process? At some point, it seems like governments of developing countries needs to care more about the living situation of their citizens than foreigners do.

Very true.
The sad thing is that some of these countries are run by despotic governments/rulers who couldn't give two s***s about their own people and just want to milk them and their country for every penny they can get.
Worse still they are aided and abetted by certain Western companies, individuals and even governments.

southsiderosie wrote: »

The other sad aspect of all of this is that if you look at work by development economists and modernization theorists in the 1960s, they were gung-ho on places like Ghana and Lebanon. Most of Southeast Asia did not even warrant a look-in, and South Korea and Singapore were poorer than many West African and Caribbean countries. Yet today they rival Western democracies in terms of GDP/capita, social outcomes, etc. The difference here does not seem to be resources, but rather determined leadership and a relative lack of corruption. Trade and advances in agriculture also played a big role, and that's where I think the West needs to focus its attention, not on stopgap measures and government payments.

I always use the example of Ghana and South Korea.
When Ghana achieved independence it was wealthier than South Korea.
Compare them today, although it must be said Ghana appears to have become more stable than a lot of it's nieghbours.

Count Dooku raised a very interesting point about population that has to be taken into consideration in order to get the country out of it's now never ending cycle of drought and famine.

The population of Ethiopia in 2003 was estimated by the United Nations at 70,678,000 with with another 44% of the population under 15 years of age.

According to the UN, the annual population growth rate for 2000–2005 was 2.46%, with the projected population for the year 2015 at 93,845,000.
AFAIK population today is circa 80,000,000 and then you can add in the other 5.2 million odd that are in Eritrea which was part of Ethiopia until 1992/93.
In 1970 the population was around 30,000,000.
In 1985 the population was estimated at around 40,000,000 which was around the period of the very much publicised famine.
Fair enough the country was at war and tearing itself apart, but it still had issues with feeding itself.

I don't think the country can support the current nevermind future predicted population sizes.
Thus when droughts strike, which is probably becoming a more common ocurrence, we are faced with situation where millions face death by starvation unless someone goes in and offers immediate aid.

It might be able to cope with it's population growth if it could trully harness the river systems and engage in huge hydoelectric and irrgation schemes.
But to do that requires huge investment and actual proper government/leadership and it probably is as pie in the sky at the moment as the ideas Bangladesh had of damming some of it's river systems to prevent flooding and the changes in river location.

edanto

Count Dooku wrote: »

Based on data from 2008

You're really splitting hairs here. My point is that we are wealthier that most Irish people know. I'm not sure what your point is.

As it happens, you're wrong. The wiki page showing the 2010 HDI still has us in 5th. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index#2010_report

We're rich, man. Someone on the social welfare in Ireland is in the top 12.5% of earners internationally.

The reasons for this are very complicated, covering politics, economics, colonialism, 'free' trade, Bretton Woods, SAPs, EPAs and a host of other things.

We're rich, they're not; they're starving (in the current crisis) and we can afford to help.

---

I also agree completely with Sarkozy about the nuances of this type of work.

For insight into the effects of unfettered greed, I would recommend The Shock Doctrine as a great book.

Cookie_Monster

Count Dooku wrote: »

Mostly fault of foreign aid, which pushed population to levels which agricultural infrastructure cannot maintain

this is the bit that everybody the world over loves to ignore.

The need for non disaster emergency aid the world over in nearly always driven by over population, simple as. Yet none of these nations even make the slightest attempt to limit thier population to what their resources can maintain.
In the good times resources barely cope so in bad times there is no surplus, no slack to take up etc.

But until the world wakes up and is willing to take responsibility for population limits nothing will change.

Count Dooku

edanto wrote: »

You're really splitting hairs here. My point is that we are wealthier that most Irish people know. I'm not sure what your point is.

As it happens, you're wrong. The wiki page showing the 2010 HDI still has us in 5th. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index#2010_report

We're rich, man. Someone on the social welfare in Ireland is in the top 12.5% of earners internationally.

The reasons for this are very complicated, covering politics, economics, colonialism, 'free' trade, Bretton Woods, SAPs, EPAs and a host of other things.

We're rich, they're not; they're starving (in the current crisis) and we can afford to help.

My point is very simple - all our wealth is coming from external borrowing, but it cannot continue forever and at one stage we will have to pay it back. Country doesn't earn enough own money even to pay biggest welfare benefits or entertain NGO workers by allowing them to distribute money which IMF/EU give to us.

edanto

So, taking your position that we are now broke as a country, and can't afford anything, would you suggest population control for Ireland?

How many children should you be allowed to have?

Would you only apply your population control policy to poor Irish families and what would the details of your policy be?

Suryavarman

sarkozy wrote: »

Finally, I'd like to make a comment on how the thread starter characterises the debate on aid: there are the pro- and anti-aid people. Firstly, this is a simplification and I personally would neither subscribe to the Sachsian or Easterlian view (also I think 'Dead Aid' by Dambisa Moyo is a terrible book). On Jeffrey Sachs, I've just returned from travelling in Latin America; on that trip, I re-read Naomi Klein's 'The Shock Doctrine' and Sachs' role in designing Bolivia's 'economic transformation' in the 1980s; his theories plunged the population into misery. By his own admission at that time, Sachs knew little about development economics but 'nearly everything there was to know about inflation'. Well, to many in Bolivia, his name is on a par with El Diablo. I would be very careful characterising the debate in such simplistic terms. Moreover, Easterly has been robustly critiqued in a number of books and journal articles.

The purpose of Sachs' work in Bolivia was to end hyperinflation and get the economy moving again. He achieved both these goals so I would be skeptical of reports of him plunging the population into misery.

edanto wrote: »

You're really splitting hairs here. My point is that we are wealthier that most Irish people know. I'm not sure what your point is.

As it happens, you're wrong. The wiki page showing the 2010 HDI still has us in 5th. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index#2010_report

We're rich, man. Someone on the social welfare in Ireland is in the top 12.5% of earners internationally.

The reasons for this are very complicated, covering politics, economics, colonialism, 'free' trade, Bretton Woods, SAPs, EPAs and a host of other things.

We're rich, they're not; they're starving (in the current crisis) and we can afford to help.

If we we can afford to help then we should be doing it privately not through government spending. For the government to continue sending aid over seas when we have a budget crisis is madness.

For insight into the effects of unfettered greed, I would recommend The Shock Doctrine as a great book.

The Shock Doctrine is probably one of the most flawed books on economics ever written and is filled with lies throughout. It's hardly recommended reading.

K-9

Suryavarman wrote: »

The Shock Doctrine is probably one of the most flawed books on economics ever written and is filled with lies throughout. It's hardly recommended reading.

I always find insight in how people dismiss books as flawed or the most flawed, tends to coincide with their way of thinking.

Suryavarman

K-9 wrote: »

I always find insight in how people dismiss books as flawed or the most flawed, tends to coincide with their way of thinking.

Even leaving ideology out of it it cannot be denied that Naomi Klein lies liberally in her book. This article shows many of the factual errors in the book:

http://reason.com/archives/2008/09/26/defaming-milton-friedman

sarkozy

Suryavarman wrote: »

Even leaving ideology out of it it cannot be denied that Naomi Klein lies liberally in her book. This article shows many of the factual errors in the book:

http://reason.com/archives/2008/09/26/defaming-milton-friedman

Johann Norberg is an ideologically-driven Swedish neoliberal who commits his own factual errors.

As for Klein's 'The Shock Doctrine', while in Africa, I became friends with an old-timer World Bank economist who served on the Bank's team planning Russia's glorious transition to free market capitalism. I asked flat out if Klein's analysis of what happened in Russia and why was accurate. He replied unequivocally, 'yes'. In fact, he said, it was a battle by the 'Stiglitzians' (unsuccessful) to minimise the destructive intentions of the 'Friedmanites'.

Suryavarman wrote:

The purpose of Sachs' work in Bolivia was to end hyperinflation and get the economy moving again. He achieved both these goals so I would be skeptical of reports of him plunging the population into misery.

Incorrect. The controlling of inflation was temporary. And it came at a significant social cost arising directly from the free market measures implemented.

The Shock Doctrine is probably one of the most flawed books on economics ever written and is filled with lies throughout. It's hardly recommended reading.

TSD is not a book on economics. It's a book on political economy. Klein makes the argument that a particular economic theory, as part of an ideology, became reality only with, initially, the use of massive repression, and later, through the exploitation of human misery. I think it's potent stuff, but like all journalistic and academic works, must be analysed coolly and carefully. Nevertheless, she relies on the analysis of the influential Andre Gunder Frank (former student of Friedman) who, with Raoul Prebish, etc., founded the 'Dependency School' of economics within the then UN-founded Economic Commission for Latin America. Out of this came a range of policy proposals which broke with US/UK orthodoxy and achieved positive results for a time.

Anyway, I would suggest you are subjecting Klein to a much higher burden of proof than you are Norberg whose criticism of The Shock Doctrine I assume you agree with and which belies your ideological predelictions. This is an unsound form of reasoning on your part.

If we we can afford to help then we should be doing it privately not through government spending. For the government to continue sending aid over seas when we have a budget crisis is madness.

Is it appropriate for private firms to be funding and therefore influencing/directing the policies of developing countries? Would you like it if, instead of receiving EU structural funds, Ireland developed with corporate money only? What would the effect of that have been? It's been bad enough that the Catholic Church has run so much for so long here.

Edanto: What's really interesting about the UN HDI (apart from where the stats come from) is one of the new measures introduced this year: the inquality-adjusted Human Development Index. Many developing countries lose much of their HDI values as a result. Shocking. However, I suspect the measures underrepresent the impact of income inequality in countries like the USA.

zebrafumbler

Financial difficulties or not, we shouldn't give one cent in foreign aid to any country as a policy. It has been a complete and utter failure that has cost us nearly 7 billion since 1990. We are now borrowing to give money to people we have no ethnic, cultural or moral connection with in any way. Let's start looking after ourselves. There are plenty of far more worthy cause at home deserving of that nearly 700 million annually. Hell, there'd be no need to slap another €100 house tax on us, if we cut that annual aid and we'd still have hundreds of millions left over. Foreign aid is an absolute outrage against the tax payers of this nation and those in favour of such a policy are traitors to this country.

Nodin

zebrafumbler wrote: »

......... We are now borrowing to give money to people we have no ethnic, cultural or moral connection with in any way.........

I would have thought all being human and having once been where they are now "connection" enough.

Zubeneschamali

zebrafumbler wrote: »

There are plenty of far more worthy cause at home deserving of that nearly 700 million annually.

Like what?

zebrafumbler wrote: »

no need to slap another €100 house tax on us

I see. So hanging onto €100 is a more worthy cause than saving dying children.

Count Dooku

edanto wrote: »

So, taking your position that we are now broke as a country, and can't afford anything, would you suggest population control for Ireland?
How many children should you be allowed to have?
Would you only apply your population control policy to poor Irish families and what would the details of your policy be?

There is no need for special policy when it will be no money to stimulate high number of children in families, which cannot afford it, while working families were punished financially for having more then two kids

sarkozy wrote: »

Incorrect. The controlling of inflation was temporary. And it came at a significant social cost arising directly from the free market measures implemented.

There is no working alternative to free market and social cost would arise significantly anyway, The only difference with shock doctrine would that it cost would be spread over generations instead of quick pain and return to growth.

sarkozy wrote: »

Is it appropriate for private firms to be funding and therefore influencing/directing the policies of developing countries?

The only difference between NGO and private companies is that NGO's make money from professional begging on behalf of poor countries in order to provide interesting job and decent pay for NGO staff without any control from public.

walshb

Hanging onto 100 Euro?

Eh, we all here do our bit for Africa, and have been doing our bit for donkeys years, and I forsee more and more and more years of it. So, trying to lay a gulit trip on someone because they don't agree with all this aid, year after year, is a litle silly, and damn arrogant.

Nodin

zebrafumbler wrote: »

What Africans do or don't do is of absolutely no interest or concern to me. My concern is for my own people, first, second and third. My people being people of European descent that is. Just to be specific. Africans left to rule themselves will do things how Africans have always done them, that is with indolence, corruption and witchcraft. What else could that 700 million Euro be spent on? Are you joking?

So, to put it bluntly, you want a "race" based aid system.

walshb

Count Dooku wrote: »

The only difference between NGO and private companies is that NGO's make money from professional begging on behalf of poor countries in order to provide interesting job and decent pay for NGO staff without any control from public.

Saying it for years; they are buisness first, charities second. It's non stop begging with them. What are they doing with all this money?

Nijmegen

zebrafumbler wrote: »

What Africans do or don't do is of absolutely no interest or concern to me. My concern is for my own people, first, second and third. My people being people of European descent that is. Just to be specific. Africans left to rule themselves will do things how Africans have always done them, that is with indolence, corruption and witchcraft. What else could that 700 million Euro be spent on? Are you joking?

Your people account for the vast majority of €2-3bn in welfare fraud every year.

Your people run the inefficient state that wastes more than €700m a year.

Your people have been, until very recently, massive net beneficiaries of foreign aid, foreign investment, foreign dole even (remember the advice, first thing you do when you got to the UK in the 1980's?)

Your people were once left to starve.

Sir Oxman

Well this topic started out well...

Thanks to all the posters who have experience in the foreign aid field directly for their thoughts - keep them coming and educate me!

sarkozy

Count Dooku wrote:

There is no need for special policy when it will be no money to stimulate high number of children in families, which cannot afford it, while working families were punished financially for having more then two kids

The Eamonn Delaney argument again. I am not denying the fact that official development assistance has led to perverse incentives which can, in limited circumstances, affect population distribution. However, it is demonstrably true that as countries develop (i.e. rising incomes, better health, access to education and gender equality), family sizes reduce.

I've said many times: the best population policy is a development policy. The best immigration policy is a development policy. The best international relations policy is a development policy.

What Africans do or don't do is of absolutely no interest or concern to me. My concern is for my own people, first, second and third.

Personally, I'm glad the USA, after WWII, didn't only think of themselves and granted Ireland large amounts of Marshall reconstruction aid for our path to economic independence. And if it wasn't for a British civil servant running guns for the Irish independence movement, thinking beyond his national concern, we may never have achieved sovereignty at all. Before that, his work led to the end of Belgian atrocities in the Congo. I'm referring to Roger Casement.

Since we, as consumers, benefit hugely from the exploitation that goes on in developing countries, it makes sense to me that we would at least contribute our fair share to reduce the damage that contributes to. Not doing so fuels global instability, which may visit us some day if we don't play our part.

I believe official development assistance (aid) needs to change radically, but I believe it's needed all the same.

Zubeneschamali

zebrafumbler wrote: »

My people being people of European descent that is. Just to be specific.

Europeans are all descended from Africans originally. Just so you know.

Count Dooku

Zubeneschamali wrote: »

Europeans are all descended from Africans originally. Just so you know.

Mostly because Africans wiped out native Europeans Neandertals 40,000 years ago

"This town ain't big enough for the both of us," says ranch foreman Nick Grindell to lawman Tim Barrett in the 1932 film The Western Code. Biologists know the principle well: Two animal species can rarely occupy the same niche. The same, it seems, goes for human populations. A new study of Neandertal and modern human sites in the south of France concludes that the moderns so greatly outnumbered their evolutionary cousins that Neandertals had little choice but to go extinct.

For more than 100,000 years, Neandertals had Europe all to themselves. Then, beginning roughly 40,000 years ago, modern humans—Homo sapiens—began migrating into the continent from Africa. Although researchers debate how long the Neandertals hung around, these ancient humans probably did not survive much longer than 5000 years. Just why they disappeared is also a matter of contention, but most experts agree that H. sapiens was able to outgun its rival in either direct or indirect competition for food and other resources.

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/07/modern-humans-10-neandertals-1.html

djpbarry

zebrafumbler wrote: »

We are now borrowing to give money to people we have no ethnic, cultural or moral connection with in any way.

Dude, I may share an ethnic connection with you, but I think I can safely say we have little cultural connection, absolutely no moral connection...

zebrafumbler wrote: »

What Africans do or don't do is of absolutely no interest or concern to me. My concern is for my own people, first, second and third. My people being people of European descent that is.

...and I don’t want your racially-motivated concern, thanks very much.

tbh

walshb wrote: »

Saying it for years; they are buisness first, charities second.

explain that old chap, would you? "businesses first, charities second" - that bit. What exactly is the purpose of their business, as far as you can tell? Are you suggesting that the raising and dispersing of funds to charitable causes is not their primary purpose?

If so, what is?
If not, what does your statement mean?

It's non stop begging with them. What are they doing with all this money?

eh...trying to keep poverty-stricken, starving people alive presumably.
Let me ask you a question - you're working, right?
And getting paid?
Every month?
Seriously, every single month?
What are you doing with all that money?

I assume, given the logic you're displaying here, that eventually you'll get to a point where you don't need any more money - how soon do you think that time will come?

Suryavarman

sarkozy wrote: »

Johann Norberg is an ideologically-driven Swedish neoliberal who commits his own factual errors.

Any chance that you might give examples or link to an article? I am of course aware of his bias but that does not subtract from the fact that he identifies quite a few factual errors in the book.

In the book Milton Friedman is described as an advisor to Pinochet despite him only ever having a short meeting with him and sending him a letter. It's also claimed that he was a supporter of the Iraq war despite him speaking out against it multiple times.

It is claimed that the reason for the Tiananmen square protests were in response to economic liberalisation when they were in response to the corruption in local governments.

Klein also claims that Hurricane Katrina was used to greatly expand the number of charter schools, much to dismay of local parents. It is true that a large number of charter schools were built but that was due to the fact that they could be built and opened much faster than the public schools could. She also ignores that the charters have huge satisfaction rating with parents. As of 2007 public schools once again outnumbered charter schools.

There is many other errors in the book but I will leave it at this for now.

As for Klein's 'The Shock Doctrine', while in Africa, I became friends with an old-timer World Bank economist who served on the Bank's team planning Russia's glorious transition to free market capitalism. I asked flat out if Klein's analysis of what happened in Russia and why was accurate. He replied unequivocally, 'yes'. In fact, he said, it was a battle by the 'Stiglitzians' (unsuccessful) to minimise the destructive intentions of the 'Friedmanites'.

I will admit that the policies didn't work in Russia. I believe there might be reasons that they didn't work other than the policies were flawed but I shall concede that they didn't work.

Incorrect. The controlling of inflation was temporary. And it came at a significant social cost arising directly from the free market measures implemented.

The average inflation rate from 1980-1986 was 1969%, the average inflation rate from 1987-1993 was 15.13%. Fair enough the second period of inflation was high but was still a fraction of the first period of inflation. The average growth rate from 1980-1986 was -1.65%, the average growth rate from 1987-1993 was 3.57% (both figures account for inflation). These figures seem to represent at least some improvement in Bolivia after the policies were implemented.

TSD is not a book on economics. It's a book on political economy. Klein makes the argument that a particular economic theory, as part of an ideology, became reality only with, initially, the use of massive repression, and later, through the exploitation of human misery. I think it's potent stuff, but like all journalistic and academic works, must be analysed coolly and carefully. Nevertheless, she relies on the analysis of the influential Andre Gunder Frank (former student of Friedman) who, with Raoul Prebish, etc., founded the 'Dependency School' of economics within the then UN-founded Economic Commission for Latin America. Out of this came a range of policy proposals which broke with US/UK orthodoxy and achieved positive results for a time.

She does seem to ignore the fact that the most of the repressed countries liberalised their economies slower than the democratic nations. She ignores that nearly every single country in the world was liberalising their economies at the time. From what I've seen of the dependency theory I must say I don't think very much of it. That she relies on the analysis of two Neo-Marxists to support her book does little to enhance her reputation as far as I'm concerned.

Anyway, I would suggest you are subjecting Klein to a much higher burden of proof than you are Norberg whose criticism of The Shock Doctrine I assume you agree with and which belies your ideological predelictions. This is an unsound form of reasoning on your part.

I of course agree with Norberg but it is more because the facts would seem to contradict Klein's claims as opposed to my ideological differences.

Is it appropriate for private firms to be funding and therefore influencing/directing the policies of developing countries? Would you like it if, instead of receiving EU structural funds, Ireland developed with corporate money only? What would the effect of that have been? It's been bad enough that the Catholic Church has run so much for so long here.

I couldn't care less if Ireland didn't receive EU structural funds. I don't see how it would have made too much of a difference.

sarkozy

From what I've seen of the dependency theory I must say I don't think very much of it.

Answering your other questions will take time, and it is perhaps off-topic. To get back onto development and aid, I'd like to know what is your view on dependency theory? Why do you disagree with the theories?

Count Dooku

tbh wrote: »

explain that old chap, would you? "businesses first, charities second" - that bit. What exactly is the purpose of their business, as far as you can tell? Are you suggesting that the raising and dispersing of funds to charitable causes is not their primary purpose?

If it would be their primary purpose, then NGO would consist only from volunteers, not of people with pay above average, often with six digits, with excuse that they have take those money in order to help poor people

tbh

tbh wrote: »

explain that old chap, would you? "businesses first, charities second" - that bit.

Sorry - one other thing. Are you saying that ALL charities are businesses first and charities second - including, say, St. V de Paul, Samaritans, MS Ireland, Aware, etc; or just the charities collecting on behalf of Africa?

walshb

tbh wrote: »

eh...trying to keep poverty-stricken, starving people alive presumably.
Let me ask you a question - you're working, right?
?

Eh, obviously not trying hard enough, if 50 years later they are still begging from us.

djpbarry

Count Dooku wrote: »

If it would be their primary purpose, then NGO would consist only from volunteers...

By that logic, all HSE staff should be employed on a voluntary basis.

afrodub

walshb wrote: »

Eh, obviously not trying hard enough, if 50 years later they are still begging from us.

To suggest "they are still begging.." is an inaccurate and poor taste remark IMHO about the issue of assisting our brothers and sisters in need,esp. those in 3rd World countries with grinding desperate poverty and conditions,count your blessings !!