Privatize Foreign Aid? (Wall Street Journal, July 7, 2007)
Summary: Acumen Fund’s “Knowledge and Communications Associate,” Rob Katz, uses the Hudson Institute’s 2007 Philanthropy Index to compare the amount and effectiveness of U.S. private foreign aid to that of U.S. official foreign aid; revealing that private aid significantly outstrips government sanctioned aid in both categories.
Topic: Should the state department of the Obama Administration double foreign aid for Africa?
Category: Mainstream Journalism
What Is It? An article for the Wall Street Jounal
Title: Privatize Foreign Aid?
Publication Information: Wall Street Journal, July 7, 2007 (Page A6)
Author: Rob Katz
Location: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118376061378259540.html?mod=most_viewed_opinion24
Accessed: February 8, 2009
Support:
• Tony Blair’s G-8 summit
• 2007 Index of Global Philanthropy, published by Hudson Institute
• Steve Case, Former AOL Chairman
Prime Minister Tony Blair’s G-8 summit is cited as promising to provide $25 billion more in foreign aid on top of the 25 billion a year that’s already provided. Katz cites numerous statistics and numbers from the Hudson Institute’s 2007 Index of Global Philanthropy as proof that the amount of private foreign aid being provided is substantial and should be taken seriously. A quote from a speech of Steve Case’s is used to lend support to that fact that the official foreign aid protocol needs to change if it wants to be relevant in the near future.
Audience and Agenda: The Wall Street Journal has almost 2 million daily subscribers, and that’s just for the print version. They reach just over another 1 million online subscribers. They have an extremely broad audience, so they have to be very “middle-of-the-road” in order to reflect their readership. The Wall Street Journal is extremely respected and considered one of the most reliable journalistic sources available, though some might argue that they’re ever so slightly slanted to the Right. The Wall Street Journal is to the Right as The New York Times is to the Left. Funded by advertisers, so they’re taken into account, clearly.
Usefulness: This article is responding to the assertion that the U.S. isn’t pulling their weight when it comes to foreign aid contributions. This assertion exists because it appears that way when only official foreign aid is counted, when privately contributed foreign aid is factored in, the U.S. is leading well ahead of every other country. It also questions the current official foreign aid system; questioning why it is that private entities can generate more foreign aid than the official U.S. government and whether or not this system might be more effective than the funds generated by middle-class tax revenue at the government level that then gets tangled up in bureaucratic hoops and possibly contributes to corrupt foreign governments. It’s leaving out all the downsides of privately funded foreign aid, the fact that the official foreign aid is actually more transparent than private foreign aid and that even private foreign aid is susceptible to corruption. He does use strong numbers though, so I could use this for my purposes if I end up including information about the differences between private and official foreign aid.
Works Cited
Wall Street Journal Media Kit
Raj M. Desai and Homi Kharas, “The California Consensus: Can Private Aid Ends Global Poverty?” from Survival vol. 50 no 4.
