Foreign Aid, Governance, Development

“The worldwide surge in prosperity over the past two generations has been nothing like the winner-take-all race that some insinuate it to be. The plain fact is that countries at every income level have benefited tremendously from the global economic updrafts of our modern age. World Bank estimates underscore this point. If we take high-income economies completely out of the picture, average real per capita output for the rest of the world more than tripled between 1960 and 2006.”

“Yet there was absolutely nothing “natural” about the human cost of this natural disaster. Massive earthquakes do not always unfold as calamities of biblical proportions, even when they are visited on major urban population centers.”

“The trouble with this narrative is that foreign aid is not exactly an untested remedy for global poverty in our day and age. To go by figures from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, total flows of development assistance to recipient countries since 1960, after adjusting for inflation, by now add up to something like $3 trillion.”

“Haiti has received more than $10 billion since 1960 in official development assistance alone (and vastly more if private aid, humanitarian assistance, and security assistance are taken into account). On a per capita basis, this works out to more than four times as much assistance per capita as Western European populations received during the Marshall Plan era. Yet Haiti’s per capita income, according to Maddison, was less than two-thirds as high in 2008 as it had been in 1960.”

“How does one account for these inconvenient facts? Evidently, by ignoring them. To make their case for aid as the necessary remedy for contemporary global poverty, proponents of the Sachs-MDG plan are willing to undertake breathtaking, even patently absurd, intellectual contortions”

“The too-little-aid theory in essence attempts to explain—or blame—the prolonged economic failure of large portions of the modern world on external factors (in this case, the stinginess of affluent Western populations). A much more plausible explanation, however, relates to domestic factors within the countries and societies in question. Perhaps most important, these concern the deep, complex, historically rooted, and interconnected issues of “culture” on the one hand and what is now called “governance” on the other.”

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/the-global-poverty-paradox-15533?page=all