WILLIAM EASTERLY:

UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown recently gave a compassionate speech about the tragedy of extreme poverty afflicting billions of people, with millions of children dying from easily preventable diseases. He called for a doubling of foreign aid, a Marshall Plan for the world’s poor. He offered hope by pointing out how easy it is to do good. Medicine that would prevent half of malaria deaths costs only 12 cents a dose. A bed net to prevent a child from getting malaria costs only $4. Preventing 5 million child deaths over the next 10 years would cost just $3 for each new mother. A program to get Amaretch into school would cost little.

However, Gordon Brown was silent about the other tragedy of the world’s poor. This is the tragedy in which the West already spent $2.3 trillion on foreign aid over the last 5 decades and still had not managed to get 12-cent medicines to children to prevent half of all malaria deaths. The West spent $2.3 trillion and still had not managed to get $4 bed nets to poor families. The West spent $2.3 trillion and still had not managed to get $3 to each new mother to prevent 5 million child deaths. The West spent $2.3 trillion and Amaretch is still carrying firewood. It’s a tragedy that so much well-meaning compassion did not bring these results for needy people.

The West’s efforts to aid the Rest have been even less successful at goals such as promoting rapid economic growth, changes in government economic policy to facilitate markets, or promotion of honest and democratic government. The evidence is stark: $568 billion spent on aid to Africa, and yet the typical African country no richer today than 40 years ago. Dozens of “structural adjustment” loans (aid loans conditional on policy reforms) made to Africa, the former Soviet Union, and Latin America, only to see the failure of both policy reform and economic growth. The evidence suggests that aid results in less democratic and honest government, not more. Yet, unchastened by this experience, we still have such absurdities as the grandiose plans by Jeffrey Sachs and the United Nations to do 449 separate interventions to reach 54 separate goals by the year 2015 (the Millennium Development Goals), accompanied by urgent pleas to double aid money.

Economic development happens, not through aid, but through the homegrown efforts of entrepreneurs and social and political reformers. While the West was agonizing over a few tens of billion dollars in aid, the citizens of India and China raised their own incomes by $715 billion by their own efforts in free markets. Once aid agencies realize that aid CANNOT achieve general economic and political development, they could start concentrating on fixing the system that fails to get 12-cent medicines to malaria victims.

Read the rest; Easterly writes on what he thinks needs to be done to get results, instead what is being actually done now.


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