Why foreign aid doesn't work

http://www.salon.com/books/int/2006/04/05/easterly/
"The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good"出版に際して、イースタリーへのインタビュー。

Last year, celebrity economist and United Nations special advisor Jeffrey D. Sachs published his opus, "The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time," to much fanfare. Bono even (or not surprisingly) wrote the introduction. In the book, Sachs unveiled his crusading vision of how increased aid to poor countries could lift their most desperate citizens out of what he called a "poverty trap." He advocated for a flood of funds from the West to transform beleaguered nations into functional societies.

Easterly's new book, "The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good," suggests that the world's official aid agencies -- the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the U.N. -- and national agencies such as USAID, have been recycling the same unworkable aid plans for the last 50 years. (Non-governmental organizations are not necessarily included in his argument.) In fact, Easterly claims that Jeffrey Sachs' strategy resembles failed utopian aid policies that date back to the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. Easterly, on the other hand, believes in small, preferably homegrown, "piecemeal" efforts that focus on one specific problem at a time, perhaps focus on one specific problem in one tiny village.

At times, Easterly sounds a lot like the typical intervention critic, casually denouncing rich white Westerners who, as he sees it, meddle in thorny affairs of which they have no genuine understanding. But Easterly once meddled himself: He worked as a World Bank official for 16 years.

My good friend Jeff Sachs' book really capitulates ideas that could have been written by Walt Rostow, an advisor to Kennedy and Eisenhower.

These ideas offer simple answers and promise big things -- the end of poverty, for example -- in a fairly easy way that doesn't require huge sacrifices from rich countries: Just increase aid a little bit more, and that would lift the world's desperately poor out of poverty.

Africans don't vote in our elections -- there's no pushback when plans don't work out or get results. Nobody is holding the aid donors accountable.

In aid, 95 percent is implementation. Five percent is raising enough money from rich-country donors. [Bob] Geldof and Bono are talking about solving the 5 percent. The 95 percent has a long chain of poorly motivated and sometimes corrupt actors in between money and poor people. Donor bureaucracies like the World Bank or IMF are even less accountable than Blair and Bush because they don't have to face election.

Bob Geldof seemed concerned about accountability when he sponsored his aid concerts this year. What happened when he raised all that money for Ethiopia in the '80s?

The problem was that the money passed through an authoritarian Marxist government whose main preoccupation was fighting a war against rebels who eventually ended up winning. There are plenty of allegations that both sides used food aid as a political weapon in war.

So, Jeffrey Sachs is obviously prominent. And so are you. How could two economists come up with such opposite conclusions on a problem that's been going on for years? Is it political motivation? Ego?

Frankly, I don't think Jeff Sachs is doing good economics.

There's been far too little learning. To learn you have to admit mistakes. In aid, it's politically poisonous to ever admit you made a mistake because then the fear is they'll cut aid.

In defense of aid agencies, they really had a bad political environment in which to operate -- they're never allowed to make mistakes and thus they never learn.

but they are failed states where very intrusive political and military intervention is taking place, which is somehow seen as the same package as foreign aid. That's very neocolonial. I get invitations now and then to attend workshops with soldiers and aid workers who learned how to work side by side to reform society. Those e-mails scare the daylights out of me. That's the last thing that should happen.

Not to overkill something that has been overkilled, but in Iraq we're showing signs of these bad tendencies: military and aid are part of same package.

But are you saying we should never intervene militarily, even during genocide? You mentioned Sudan.

One should never say never. It's very hard to watch "Hotel Rwanda" and say the West should never intervene. I'm sure if we're on the ground in Darfur it would be very hard to say the West should keep hands off. But again, that's the contrast between the grandiose plans to fix whole countries vs. the piecemeal apparatus that tries to help individuals and solve specific problems. Even with military intervention I think this same divide could apply. Yes, try and figure out a way to rescue civilians in Darfur from rape and murder and burning villages, but certainly do not attempt to invade Sudan and achieve regime change that is aimed at turning Sudan into an oasis of peace and prosperity. Just have more specific doable things that you can be held accountable for.