Foreign Aid News

After recent evidence showed that China was receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid funds to fight diseases such as malaria that were almost non-existent in the country—and at the expense of other developing countries suffering thousands of deaths from these same diseases—there are new reports revealing that this is just the tip of the iceberg and that China is receiving billons of dollars in foreign aid each year. Many are now asking why, when China spends billions of dollars on lavish projects such as the 2008 Olympics and the Shanghai Expo, it deserves any aid at all.  read more »

Leaders from across the world recently pledged to step up foreign aid efforts in order to meet the much-talked-about Millennium Development goals. But more and more economists, politicians and academics are arguing that an efficient and accountable tax regime will do a much better job promoting development than foreign aid.  read more »

There is nothing egregious about the eight MDG targets. Halving poverty, increasing education, and reducing maternal and child mortality are desirable outcomes. The only problem is that in the poorest countries the goals will not be met because they are based on a failed development model of relying on external aid rather than internal policy change to facilitate economic development and growth.  read more »

Foreign aid is a flop, say an increasing number of Third World experts, leaders, and foreign aid executives who have witnessed, first hand, its inability to deliver development. Nowhere is foreign aid’s failure clearer, they argue, than in Africa—the darling of aid agencies. In the latest salvo, Kurt Gerhardt a former journalist and country director for the German Development Service (DED) in Niger in West Africa, has written a scathing denunciation of foreign aid in Der Spiegel, one of Germany's leading publications.  read more »

In the wake of Dambisa Moyo’s blockbuster book, “Dead Aid”, which details the devastating impact foreign aid handouts have had on the African continent, other aid critics are speaking up too and criticizing the billions of dollars poured into the developing world. Now, in a letter to the Daily Telegraph, a group of scholars and other leaders from across the continent, are asking the British public and politicians to put an end to the billions of dollars of foreign aid they dump on the African continent year after year.  read more »

If an identical earthquake struck two different countries of the same economic standing, but of a different political makeup, would the results be the same? And if one country was founded on a democracy, while the other was led by an autocrat, who would be worse off? Two professors, writing in Foreign Affairs, provide a convincing argument that citizens living under a democratically-run government would be much better off than those living under the rule of an autocrat.  read more »

As deadly floods continue to disrupt the lives of Pakistan's hapless flood-afflicted millions, the county’s government is defending itself from allegations that during the last humanitarian crisis—the Kashmir earthquake in 2005—corrupt officials diverted hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid to other unidentified government expenditures. Donors are now thinking twice about handing over millions more to a country where, says one critic, the “weakness of the state has reached extraordinary levels.”  read more »

The Chinese government is quickly learning how to milk the foreign aid game. In a recent report, China—despite holding on to more than $2.4-trillion of foreign reserves and, itself, giving billions of dollars in aid to less developed countries—has received $1-billion in aid money from the Global Fund, with the World Bank as its trustee, to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, making it the fourth largest recipient of the aid program, and putting it ahead of traditional aid favourites such as Ethiopia, India and Tanzania for the program’s grants.  read more »

Many look to the U.S. as the necessary catalyst for change say watchdog groups, such as Probe International. The U.S. essentially subsidizes Pakistan’s economy by providing billions in foreign aid, giving the Pakistani government little incentive to reform the tax system. Thus, indirectly, U.S. aid inevitably hurts Pakistan's poor.  read more »

As the British government looks for ways to save money, the public has been quick with a suggestion: cut foreign aid. According to recent reports, after George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, appealed to the public for ways to cut the country’s debt, the most popular response was to make major cuts to the government’s overseas aid budget.  read more »