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bigverne
Joined: 12 May 2004
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 Posted: Sun May 10, 2009 12:54 am Post subject: |
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| I think you are forgetting the massive amounts of American dollars that were pumped into South Korea, as it was the poster child against the communist onslaught. |
Yet similar amounts of money have been pumped into other countries (i.e Egypt) with far less successful results. The fact remains that the Korean government used their money very wisely building up productive industries. And most of this money came in the form of loans from the Japanese. |
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Pluto
Joined: 19 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Mon May 11, 2009 7:34 am Post subject: |
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| bigverne wrote: |
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| I think you are forgetting the massive amounts of American dollars that were pumped into South Korea, as it was the poster child against the communist onslaught. |
Yet similar amounts of money have been pumped into other countries (i.e Egypt) with far less successful results. The fact remains that the Korean government used their money very wisely building up productive industries. And most of this money came in the form of loans from the Japanese. |
I believe the percieved success of the Marshall Plan is what led to aid being dumped into Africa. The thinking was if it worked in Western Europe, why not Africa.
Aid in Afganistan
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Vast sums of money are being lavished by Western aid agencies on their own officials in Afghanistan at a time when extreme poverty is driving young Afghans to fight for the Taliban. The going rate paid by the Taliban for an attack on a police checkpoint in the west of the country is $4, but foreign consultants in Kabul, who are paid out of overseas aids budgets, can command salaries of $250,000 to $500,000 a year.
The high expenditure on paying, protecting and accommodating Western aid officials in palatial style helps to explain why Afghanistan ranks 174th out of 178th on a UN ranking of countries' wealth. This is despite a vigorous international aid effort with the US alone spending $31bn since 2002 up to the end of last year.
The high degree of wastage of aid money in Afghanistan has long been an open secret. In 2006, Jean Mazurelle, the then country director of the World Bank, calculated that between 35 per cent and 40 per cent of aid was "badly spent". "The wastage of aid is sky-high," he said. "There is real looting going on, mainly by private enterprises. It is a scandal."
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$31B of aid being donated by US taxpayers to Afganistan since 2002. Well, isn't that generous of us. I'm sure these lavish six figure salaries are being paid to "experts" who "understand the situation on the ground."
yet...
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| Though 77 per cent of Afghans lack access to clean water, Mr Bahadery said that aid agencies and the foreign contractors who work for them insist that every bedroom should have an en-suite bathroom and this often doubles the cost of accommodation. |
Some stats at the end of the article.
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Go figure: The West's spending in Afghanistan
$57 The foreign aid per capita to Afghanistan, compared with $580 per capita in the aftermath of the Bosnian conflict.
$250,000 Typical salary of foreign consultants in Afghanistan, including 35 per cent hardship allowance and 35 per cent danger money. Afghan civil servants typically receive less than $1,000 a year.
$22bn The shortfall in donations compared to the international community's estimate of Afghanistan's need � around 48 per cent.
40 per cent Share of international aid budget returned to aid countries in corporate profit and consultant salaries � more than $6bn since 2001.
$7m Daily aid spend in Afghanistan. The daily military spend by the US government is around $100m.
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Tue Jun 02, 2009 10:54 am Post subject: |
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This Moyo lady has been the focus of a large, international smear campaign. I don't think the aid industry likes having its dirty laundry aired.
The vast majority of aid doesn't achieve the goals it is supposed to. In fact, aid might (it is STRONGLY correlated) un-develop a state.
Given that the above is absolutely true, why do these people keep demanding more of the same? Is the aid for the poor or for the aid industry?
https://members.canada.com/login.aspx?site=cc&brand=nationalpost&provider=npcs&ReturnUrl=http://network.nationalpost.com%2fnp%2fblogs%2ffullcomment%2farchive%2f2009%2f06%2f01%2fafrica-s-dead-aid.aspx
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Africa�s �dead aid�
from Full Comment by NP Editor
Many if not most people in the Third World consider foreign aid to be a joke
In one corner, we have two well-meaning members of the Western establishment, whose advice over the decades has, as much as anyone�s, brought the Third World to its knees. Their view: The Third World needs more of their advice.
And in the other corner we have two people from the Third World, one from Africa, one from South America, who tell these Westerners, and all the paternalistic people they represent, to stop the harm: Stop undermining our economies with food aid that destroys our farmers� ability to compete, they say. And stop the other development aid whose main effect has been to empower our dictators against our people by supplying the dictators with the largesse needed to maintain their secret police while rewarding their cronies and themselves.
The foreign aid champions are Paul Collier, Oxford author of The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It, and Canada�s own Stephen Lewis, former Canadian ambassador to the UN and special envoy on African crises. Last night they debated Peru�s Hernando de Soto, the economist whose widely acclaimed book, The Other Path, in the 1980s delivered a body blow to the foreign aid industry, and Zambia�s Dambisa Moyo, Collier�s former student and the author of the New York Times best-seller, Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There is A Better Way for Africa, a new book that so powerfully threatens the foreign aid industry that many of its leading exponents are mobilizing to stop her.
Last night�s match, in fact, was an early round in an emerging global debate between the choices on offer: Will it be top-down development, with Western governments dispensing development aid to their Third World counterparts, as Collier and Lewis and various rock stars prescribe? Or will development be allowed to rise up from the grass roots, as de Soto and Moyo recommend? The top-downers, sensing that a fight to the finish may have begun, have rapidly ramped up the rhetoric.
The United Nations� human development report office accuses Moyo of �blaming the fire engine because it is near the fire.� Harvard�s Jeffrey Sachs, perhaps the world�s leading aid guru, finds her ideas to be �absolutely pernicious, and could lead to the deaths of millions of people.� Uganda�s Infectious Disease Institute claims she would cause �death on a genocidal scale.� And Bob Geldof�s charity, ONE, warning that Moyo�s proposal �would quite literally lead to the deaths of millions of Africans,� has even launched an e-mail campaign to enlist African NGOs to counter Moyo.
To date, the campaigns to discredit Moyo � whom Time magazine just dubbed one of the world�s 100 most influential people � have failed, with some organizations, like Zambia�s Centre for Infectious Disease Research, rallying to her side. Many if not most people in the Third World consider foreign aid to be a joke, and are incredulous when they learn that Westerners think it actually does some good.
But Moyo is also making headway among people in the west. Her allies are the facts: Africa received $1-trillion in aid over the last half-century with disastrous results. When aid to Africa was at its peak, between 1970 and 2000, Africa�s poverty rate actually shot up from 11% to 66%. All told, the countries that have been most reliant on aid saw their economies go backward � they experienced negative growth in GDP.
The Stephen Lewis-Paul Collier camp, in other words, has it backwards. The top-down government aid that they specialize in kills national economies and African livelihoods. Moyo�s Dead Aid is aptly named.
Financial Post
Patricia Adams is executive director of Probe International and author of Odious Debts: Loose Lending, Corruption and the Third World�s Environmental Legacy. |
We need to stop treating poor nations like a non-profit zoo. |
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Sergio Stefanuto
Joined: 14 May 2009
Location: UK
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| Posted: Tue Jun 02, 2009 4:12 pm Post subject: Re: Ending the Aid Charade: Best Ways to Help Africa |
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| blade wrote: |
| Pluto wrote: |
In 1970, many Africans had become free people, and there was new hope for a freer more prosperous future away from European ownership. To be sure, Africa wasn�t as advanced as Western Europe or North America, but the poverty rate stood at just 10%. It is that fact, that Africa was relatively poor compared to Europe or NA that led to Western nations to give aid to African nations. Since 1970, a little more than US$1 Trillion has been donated. Most of this aid has been transferred from Western governments to African regimes via the IMF or the World Bank. Has any of this aid helped? Well, no. Nowadays, almost 70% of Africans suffer abject poverty, widespread pestilence and disease (ie. HIV/AIDS and Malaria), bleak economic growth and live under the World�s most tyrannical regimes. 50% of the World�s poor live in Sub-Saharan Africa where average GDP is one dollar per day. Since 1980, many of the World�s poor have been lifted out of abject poverty while 50% more Africans have found themselves living in abject poverty. I could go on, but there are so many things wrong on so many levels. The long and the short of it are that the money that Western donors have gone to governments. This makes governments accountable to the IMF or the World Bank as opposed to their own people for tax collections.
The best way to stop all of this nonsense is to stop donating, and start trusting in free peoples, free enterprise and free markets. This is one regard in which the West can learn a lot from China. Chinese institutions, both public and private, have done more to develop Africa in the past few years than any other country on Earth. Thousands of miles of pipelines, energy grids, roads and other critical infrastructure have mostly been funded via Chinese FDI. To be sure, the Chinese are following their self interests in pursuing what is underneath Africa�s soil (ie. Oil, gold, copper, etc.), but to say that the Chinese aren�t doing more to pulling many Africans out of poverty is just farcical. Best to follow the Chinese example, get entrepreneurs and private charities into Africa, and get governments out.
Source: Dambisa Moyo is the author of Dead Aid She can be seen here in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corp. |
I'd like to know where this so called trillion dollars of aid went and sort of strings were attached to it? I suspect much of this aid went from donor countries to swiss bank accounts via your average African dictator with very little if any actually reaching the people it supposedly intended for. I also suspect that much of this "aid" came with large strings attached i.e. purchase of goods and services (Military aid) from donor countries. |
That's the whole point. Aid solidifies the status quo. Even if the aid goes directly to the people (and none whatsoever to crummy African regimes), how could this possibly not solidify the status quo (if I were a dictator and my people were starving, how would I feel about rich countries giving my people lots of money?)
Aid to Africa is emotionally-satisfying but creates the problem it wants to solve. It is, in other words, classic leftist thinking.
What needs to take place are (a) internal changes, such as changes to corrupt law enforcement (more like the Mafia), introduction of property rights, and the availability of credit. Without property rights, there can be no possible system of credit (or capital), and (b) freer and expansive international trade (how could a third world society possibly not benefit from having many major corporations and enterprise providing more goods to consumers, jobs for workers and thereby tax revenues?) |
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Sergio Stefanuto
Joined: 14 May 2009
Location: UK
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| Posted: Tue Jun 02, 2009 4:21 pm Post subject: |
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| soviet_man wrote: |
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| start trusting in free peoples, free enterprise and free markets. |
That is how they got into the mess to start with.
It was colonialism from Europe that was the starting point for these problems.
If they were left alone and retained their traditional indigenous structures the social and economic disruption would not have happened. |
Two teeny-weeny problems with that:
(1) colonized countries must have been considerably poorer to begin with (otherwise, how could the colonists be so much more powerful as to, er, colonize them?)
(2) There are rich and prosperous countries whose overseas conquests have been minor or nonexistent and countries mired in poverty that have never been colonized |
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Sergio Stefanuto
Joined: 14 May 2009
Location: UK
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| Posted: Thu Nov 19, 2009 2:01 pm Post subject: |
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Nothing we didn't know already, but......
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Aid we give to the Third World is more harmful than helpful
Despite record levels of foreign aid for health, almost no progress is being made in improving child mortality in the poorest parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Many countries are going backwards. This is not surprising (the daft idea that if western governments transfer enough money to governments in poor countries, health systems will magically improve and medicines will get to sick kids).
Once it makes it to the recipient government, what happens to that money is anyone's guess. There is almost no data on how aid money makes its way through recipient health systems.
When some aid money does make it to local clinics, World Bank research shows it is most often the educated, urban classes who benefit, rather than the rural poor for whom it is really intended. To cap it all, the influence of Western NGOs on donors has also meant that "fashionable" diseases such as HIV get the lion's share of funding, to the detriment of less high profile problems such as pneumonia, which kill many, many more.
adamsmith.org/blog |
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Pluto
Joined: 19 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Tue Dec 01, 2009 9:57 am Post subject: |
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| Mises wrote: |
| Ontheway, I agree with you, I think. I'll be watching Zimbabwe very closely. I don't know if the hoards of liberal arts consultants will allow an African state to exist without capital controls, price controls, people controls etc for any length of time. |
These consultants should listen to the wise Zambian. |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Tue Dec 01, 2009 10:04 am Post subject: |
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| But Pluto, without the aid industry, where would the anthropology grads from Sarah Lawrence College work? |
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Pluto
Joined: 19 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Tue Dec 01, 2009 10:15 am Post subject: |
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| Giving up a quarter million dollar salary (see above) is never easy. Particularly those with East Polynesian History BAs will have trouble. I don't know; maybe they could take a cooking class, go to law school, I don't know. I'm sure they would figure something out. . |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Tue Dec 01, 2009 10:21 am Post subject: |
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| If the aid industry is dismantled, the academic pedigree of your average esler in China/Korea will dramatically change. If the Koreans thought the philosophy grads from UBC were preachy...Look out! |
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Pluto
Joined: 19 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Tue Dec 01, 2009 10:32 am Post subject: |
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| Do you mean an unemployed, heavily indebted, recent JD graduate and former African �disaster management consultant� coming to teach English in South Korea? God help us! |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Tue Dec 01, 2009 10:38 am Post subject: |
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Before you know it, Korea will have a well-funded international anti-AIDS campaign and a massive (statistically modeled) increase in hiv infections. Africa Alley in Itaewon will receive a UN-Soros funded "outreach" office and the number of black SUV's on the streets will triple.
Rents in Itaewon will skyrocket too. Hmm.. There might be a real estate play here. |
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Pluto
Joined: 19 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Tue Dec 01, 2009 12:22 pm Post subject: |
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| mises wrote: |
Before you know it, Korea will have a well-funded international anti-AIDS campaign and a massive (statistically modeled) increase in hiv infections. Africa Alley in Itaewon will receive a UN-Soros funded "outreach" office and the number of black SUV's on the streets will triple.
Rents in Itaewon will skyrocket too. Hmm.. There might be a real estate play here. |
Don't forget the Climate Conferences! The Climate Conferences! |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Tue Dec 01, 2009 9:04 pm Post subject: |
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| Pluto wrote: |
| mises wrote: |
Before you know it, Korea will have a well-funded international anti-AIDS campaign and a massive (statistically modeled) increase in hiv infections. Africa Alley in Itaewon will receive a UN-Soros funded "outreach" office and the number of black SUV's on the streets will triple.
Rents in Itaewon will skyrocket too. Hmm.. There might be a real estate play here. |
Don't forget the Climate Conferences! The Climate Conferences! |
How could I forget! Soon, the Soros-UN Center for Corean Climate Justice will be hosting seminars (with Al Gore and Bono) on how the Cheonggyecheon is going to overflow and Seoul will be underwater in ten years!!!!!! They'll present PEER-REVIEWED DATA!!! The right-wing throwbacks who disagree will be compared to Japanese collaborators during the colonial era. |
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Fox
Joined: 04 Mar 2009
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| Posted: Mon Dec 14, 2009 10:05 pm Post subject: |
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Now, evidently, we are expected to give aid so that women in the third world can enjoy feminine products during their periods.
I find the claim that affordable feminine products will directly and substantially improve the economic situation in these areas ridiculous, to be honest. No, I don't think some girl having tampons is going to lead to her creating a new business in her community that will draw jobs and improve everyone's life. |
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