Beyond foreign aid – recommendations to a House of Commons enquiry
03 Oct 2014 Leave a comment
in development economics, growth disasters, growth miracles Tags: development aid, foreign aid, overseas development aid
- Reducing trade barriers that limit exports from poor countries: implementing aspects of the Doha Round negotiation could create real income gains for low- and lower middle-income countries of more than £28 billion a year.
- Facilitating private investment, especially for infrastructure: lack of infrastructure financing for African countries may be reducing growth in some countries by as much as 2% a year.
- Protecting global environmental public goods, which create substantial value for poor countries (fisheries alone contribute an estimated £17 billion a year to African economies), and the burden of whose depletion falls disproportionately on low-income countries.
- Facilitating more research and development and technology transfer, ranging from new or cheaper pharmaceutical products to intellectual property that can be used by firms in poor countries. e) Increasing the proportion of migration that comes from developing countries: even temporary migration of poor workers to rich countries creates massive annual income gains far larger than any aid programme.
- Promoting security. While civil wars have a human cost and set back economic growth, the UK spends exports £12 billion worth of military and dual-use equipment to states on the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s list of Countries of Concern for human rights abuses.
P.T. Bauer on development aid as a precondition to development in the Third World
14 Jun 2014 Leave a comment
in development economics, growth miracles, P.T. Bauer Tags: development aid, P.T. Bauer, The Great Enrichment, The Great Fact
Foreign aid is clearly not a necessary condition of economic development. This fact is obvious from the history of the developed countries, all of which began poor and have invariably progressed without government-to-government aid.
It is clear also from the history of many underdeveloped countries — Hong Kong, Japan, Malaya — which have advanced in recent decades without foreign aid.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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