Dead aid5/30/2023 Pursue these options, and aid wouldn’t be necessary at all. Moyo also recommends microfinance, property rights a la De Soto, and embracing foreign direct investment and trade with China. One is to get a credit rating and issue bonds, like everyone else does. Instead, they should turn to some of the many other ways to finance development. It doesn’t have to be immediate, but basically donors need to get on the phone and tell African governments that in five years time, aid will stop. The answer then, is to break the aid cycle. “It’s time to stop pretending that the aid-based development model currently in place will generate sustained economic growth in the world’s poorest countries” she writes. It creates dependencies, props up bad governments, discourages transparency, undermines local enterprise, reduces incentives to save and stunts growth. Worse, aid isn’t just ineffective, it is counter-productive. To summarise, western countries have pumped a trillion dollars into Africa over the last half century with almost nothing to show for it. The title of the book makes Moyo’s thesis pretty clear: Dead Aid – why aid is not working and how there is another way for Africa. Furthermore, Dambisa Moyo is a woman, and an African, in a debate that is rather weighted towards white men in Western universities. It’s got a lot of attention because while there are many books that critique development aid, none have come out quite as aggressively and entirely against it. Dead Aid is a much talked about book that has taken me a little while to get round to.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |