Does health aid to governments make governments spend more on health?
Posted: April 14, 2010 Filed under: Foreign Aid Leave a comment »“…on average, for every health aid dollar given, developing country government shifted between $.43 and $1.17 of their own resources away from health. The trend is most pronounced in Africa, which received the largest amount of health aid.”
http://aidwatchers.com/2010/04/does-health-aid-to-governments-make-governments-spend-more-on-health/
Do elites benefit from democracy and foreign aid in developing countries?
Posted: April 11, 2010 Filed under: Foreign Aid Leave a comment »“It thus appears that foreign aid, contrary to popular beliefs, leads to a more skewed income distribution in democratic developing countries while the effects are negligible in autocratic countries.”
Peter Bauer: Cato
Posted: April 7, 2010 Filed under: Development Economics, Foreign Aid Leave a comment »http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj25n3/cj25n3.html
Does Foreign Aid Help?
Posted: April 7, 2010 Filed under: Foreign Aid, Uncategorized Leave a comment »http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj26n1/cj26n1-1.pdf
Small States: Not Handicapped and Under-Aided, but Advantaged and Over-Aided
Posted: April 7, 2010 Filed under: Foreign Aid 1 Comment »http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj28n3/cj28n3-5.pdf
Bauer and the Failure of Foreign Aid
Posted: April 7, 2010 Filed under: Foreign Aid Leave a comment »http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj29n3/cj29n3-1.pdf
Was that foreign aid … or a campaign contribution?
Posted: March 29, 2010 Filed under: Democracy, Foreign Aid, Politics, Uncategorized Leave a comment »Sent to you via Google Reader
Was that foreign aid … or a campaign contribution?
Exploring the failure of foreign aid: The role of incentives and information
Posted: March 20, 2010 Filed under: Foreign Aid Leave a comment »http://www.springerlink.com/content/v1h1h447l3554920/
“The stated purpose of foreign aid is to promote economic and human development. Recently, the ability of foreign aid to achieve its goals is called into question. Widespread conceptual and empirical literature suggests that foreign aid is ineffective. This paper explores the failure of foreign aid relying on the role of both incentives and information. The success of aid depends on incentives faced by all parties in donor and recipient countries. In addition, both donors and recipients must obtain the necessary information to actually target and achieve desired goals. This analysis provides a double-edged sword to explain why foreign aid fails to achieve development goals.”
Graph of the day: Where the foreign aid goes
Posted: March 16, 2010 Filed under: Foreign Aid, Uncategorized Leave a comment »Sent to you via Google Reader
Graph of the day: Where the foreign aid goes
Via Wild Bill, US foreign aid by recipient, 2004-08:
Daniel J. SmithSent Via Mobile Phone
Dirty Little Secret of Poverty
Posted: February 10, 2010 Filed under: Foreign Aid, Income Gap, Inequality, Poverty, Welfare Leave a comment »“…the dirty little secret of global poverty: some of the most wretched suffering is caused not just by low incomes but also by unwise spending by the poor…Our interviews and perusal of the data available suggest that the poorest families in the world spend approximately 10 times as much (20 percent of their incomes on average) on a combination of alcohol, prostitution, candy, sugary drinks and lavish feasts as they do on educating their children (2 percent).”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/magazine/23Women-t.html
David Friedman on Aids Transmission
Posted: December 7, 2009 Filed under: AIDS, Development Economics, Foreign Aid Leave a comment »“As a result of references in an online discussion, I recently came across two published articles which offer evidence that this explanation is wrong, that vaginal transmission rates in Africa are not substantially higher than elsewhere. They go on to suggest that what is really going on may be iatrogenic, doctor caused, disease, that much of the transmission may be due to sloppy medical procedures, in particular the reuse of needles for injections. The evidence is in part from the pattern of infection—rates are apparently much too high among young people who have not had sex and whose mothers are not HIV positive, suggesting a non-sexual transmission mechanism. In part it is from studies that try to measure the transmission rate via vaginal intercourse. In part it is from regional patterns that don’t fit the patterns of the supposed causes.”
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2009/12/aids-in-africa-disturbing-evidence.html
Africa is Rich
Posted: November 17, 2009 Filed under: Foreign Aid Leave a comment »http://aidwatchers.com/2009/11/africa-is-rich/
“So why do we insist on defining Africans only on the dimension in which Africa looks worst – material income – when on some other dimensions Africa compares well to the West? Wouldn’t it be a lot less patronizing if we recognized the riches as well as the poverty of Africa?”
Dead aid: Why aid is not working and how there is a better way for Africa
Posted: November 13, 2009 Filed under: Foreign Aid Leave a comment »http://www.springerlink.com/content/m237p1hh244m1253/
Democracy Failings
Posted: November 10, 2009 Filed under: Democracy, Development Economics, Foreign Aid Leave a comment »http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/11/democracy-failings.html
Let them vote with their feet
Posted: November 6, 2009 Filed under: Foreign Aid, Free Trade, Immigration, Uncategorized Leave a comment »Let them vote with their feet
The White Man’s Burden Documentary Trailer
Posted: November 4, 2009 Filed under: Foreign Aid Leave a comment »http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_iM05nZll4
Starving for Freedom Blame famine on trade restrictions, not on climate change or a lack of Western aid.
Posted: November 4, 2009 Filed under: Development Economics, Foreign Aid, Free Trade Leave a comment »http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704107204574474731971741364.html
HT: Chris Coyne over at the Austrian Economists http://austrianeconomists.typepad.com/weblog/2009/11/development-links.html
The Political Economy of Aid Optimism or Pessimism
Posted: October 27, 2009 Filed under: Foreign Aid Leave a comment »The Political Economy of Aid Optimism or Pessimism
What Can Aid Do?
Posted: October 19, 2009 Filed under: Foreign Aid Leave a comment »http://www.peterleeson.com/What_Can_Aid_Do.pdf
What Can Foriegn Aid do for the World’s Poor?
Posted: October 13, 2009 Filed under: Foreign Aid Leave a comment »http://www.cato-unbound.org/archives/april-2006/
Easterly on the New Global Religion
Posted: September 29, 2009 Filed under: Corruption, Foreign Aid Leave a comment »http://blogs.nyu.edu/fas/dri/aidwatch/2009/09/the_newest_global_religion.html
“(1) If you are an aid agency that covers hunger, exactly what is your excuse for not meeting the unmet needs for nutritional and vitamin supplements? These supplements are cheap, they have been demonstrated to work, and they fit well into other aid programs like conditional cash transfers.
(2) If you are the US government, how can you take a solemn vow to feed the hungry when there ARE food emergencies and yet you still insist the food come from American farmers and shippers? This leads tomonths of delays while people are dying from hunger. Sometimes the food arrives after the emergency is over, and then makes sustainable future food supplies worse by driving food prices down and driving local farmers out of business.”
Your aid dollars at work… suppressing voters
Posted: September 27, 2009 Filed under: Corruption, Foreign Aid, Military, Uncategorized 1 Comment »Sent to you via Google Reader
Your aid dollars at work… suppressing voters
Colombia receives more U.S. military aid than all but Israel and Egypt. That aid is allocated in an unusual way: to specific brigades and bases of the Colombian armed forces. I wish I’d noticed that. Instead, I learn the fact in a new paper by Suresh Naidu and Oedrilla Dube.
With town-by-town variation in military aid, Dube and Naidu can look how annual changes affect local violence and politics. The result?
a 1% increase in US military assistance increases paramilitary attacks by 1.5% more in base municipalities, and lowers turnout for mayoral elections by .2% and .12% more in militarily and electorally contested regions
Their intuition: military aid indirectly helps paramilitary groups carry out political attacks and intimidate voters.
On the plus side, this at least suggests our aid is effective at something.
I wouldn’t say such evidence damns Plan Colombia. Fighting drug-funded insurgents is ugly but important. You don’t always get to pick your allies. But it suggests the U.S. might have a greater obligation to promote local democracy and safety alongside its military aid (and no, not by the military themselves).
Suresh is on the economics and political science job markets, and is easily one of the smartest and most creative scholars I know. Interview this man.
Daniel J. SmithSent Via Mobile Phone
Foriegn Aid to Corrupt Dictators
Posted: September 23, 2009 Filed under: Corruption, Foreign Aid Leave a comment »How the British Invented “Development” to Keep the Empire and Substitute for Racism
Posted: September 18, 2009 Filed under: Corruption, Development Economics, Foreign Aid Leave a comment »http://blogs.nyu.edu/fas/dri/aidwatch/2009/09/how_the_british_invented_devel.html
Coyne on Aid to Dictators
Posted: September 16, 2009 Filed under: Corruption, Development Economics, Foreign Aid Leave a comment »http://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?a=739
African Entrepreneurs – Freakonomics Blog – NYTimes.com
Posted: September 11, 2009 Filed under: Entrepreneurship, Foreign Aid, Uncategorized Leave a comment »http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/african-entrepreneurs/?emc=eta1
Daniel J. Smith
Sent Via Mobile Phone
Aid and Specialization
Posted: September 1, 2009 Filed under: Division of Labor, Foreign Aid Leave a comment »http://blogs.nyu.edu/fas/dri/aidwatch/2009/09/beyonces_secret_for_greater_ai.html
Easterly on Genocides
Posted: August 31, 2009 Filed under: Foreign Aid Leave a comment »http://blogs.nyu.edu/fas/dri/aidwatch/2009/08/how_i_dont_care_about_genocide.html
