Aiding And Abetting: Foreign Aid Failures And The 0.7% Deception - Softcover

Foreman, Jonathan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1906837449 ISBN 13: 9781906837440

Publisher: Civitas/Inst for the Study of, 1705

Synopsis

At a time of cuts in public expenditure, Britain's Coalition government is committed not only to maintaining the UK's foreign aid budget but to increasing it, in order to meet the target of 0.7 per cent of GDP, despite opinion polls that show it to be unpopular with the electorate. Jonathan Foreman explains why scepticism about the utility and even morality of much foreign aid is more than justified; why so much of the rhetoric used to justify the UK's lavish aid policy is disingenuous or dishonest; and why 0.7 per cent of GDP is an arbitrary number unconnected with either poor country needs or rich country capability. He argues that after six decades and more than three trillion dollars of official development aid, there is little evidence for its effectiveness. Development aid tends to undermine good government, enrich corrupt tyrants and subsidise warlords rather than promote economic growth. Meanwhile, emergency or humanitarian aid, the imagery of which is used by the aid industry and the government to market all foreign aid, is a much more complicated, difficult and morally problematic activity than its promoters and many practitioners would like the public to know. While government officials claim that British aid benefits the UK as well as its intended recipients, by winning goodwill and by making foreign conflict and mass immigration less likely, there is little or no evidence that any of these claims are true. Foreman does not argue for an end to aid, but rather that it should be reality-based rather than faith-based, i.e. it should rest on realistic calculations about the likely fate of donations to poor country governments, UN agencies, international bureaucracies and large charities. He recommends abandoning the 0.7 per cent target; a Royal Commission to investigate the purpose of foreign aid; shifting up to one third of the aid budget and a significant part of UK emergency aid to those branches of the armed forces which have the capacity to deliver it more effectively than NGOs; and the funding of the BBC World Service from the aid budget.

About this title

About the Author

Jonathan Foreman is a writer, researcher and editor based in London and New Delhi. With an academic background in history and law, his primary areas of interest are urban policy, security and defence, South Asian affairs and film. He is currently co-editor of The Indian Quarterly and a Senior Research Fellow at Civitas. Foreman was one of the founders for the British monthly magazine Standpoint and served as its deputy editor until 2009. In recent years he has reported from Beirut and Mumbai for Standpoint, from Pakistan for the Daily Telegraph Magazine, from Afghanistan for National Review, and from the Chad/Darfur border for Men's Vogue. In 2005 Vanity Fair sent him to Baghdad and Basra to report on Coalition efforts to train Iraqi security forces. He was formerly based in New York, where he was at various times a war correspondent, leader writer and film critic for the New York Post, a contributing editor at the Manhattan Institute's City Journal and a contributing editor at the U.S. National Law Journal. He has written for a variety of publications on both sides of the Atlantic including The New Yorker, The Spectator, The Financial Times, The Sunday Times Magazine, the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, and The First Post.

Edition details

• Publisher: Civitas/Inst for the Study of
• Publication date: 1705
• ISBN 10: 1906837449
• ISBN 13: 9781906837440
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 249