The Effectiveness of Foreign Aid (Council on Foreign Relations, December 1, 2006)
Summary: Acclaimed economic growth and development experts, William Easterly and Steven Radelet, go head-to-head debating the effectiveness of the current U.S. foreign aid policy; exposing the problems with the system and introducing potential solutions for those problems.
Should the state department of the Obama administration double foreign aid for Africa?
Category: Institutional
What is it? A written online debate
Title: The Effectiveness of Foreign Aid
Publication Information: Council on Foreign Relations, December 1, 2006
Author: Easterly, William; Radelet, Steven
Location: http://www.cfr.org/publication/12077/
Accessed: January 29, 2009
Support:
• The 40 countries who have adopted PRSPs (Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers)
• Successes of Indonesia, Muhammad Yunus, Egypt, and Mozambique with foreign aid
• Failures of many African countries including Somalia, Mali, Rwanda, Zambia, Haiti etc.
• E-mails from knowledgeable people in aid-receiving countries complaining that they don’t see any evidence of aid
• Millennium Development Goals Campaign
• Jean-Bedel Bokassa (Central Africa Republic), Ferdinand Marcos, and Baby Doc Duvalier (Haiti), corrupt dictators
Easterly and Radelet use these examples and sources to argue their points and provide evidence of where foreign aid has worked and where it has failed. Radelet uses the list of successes to point out where aid has helped these countries in their development. Easterly uses the list of failures to point out that where foreign aid has (marginally) assisted the successes, it has done nothing in these countries. Easterly cites his contacts in Africa (Haiti specifically) who don’t see any evidence of aid money. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) campaign is held up as the center point of the foreign aid and it has failed, because of its top-down tactics. Just a sample of the corrupt dictators in Africa are cited as reasons why foreign aid often fails, they use the money for their own purposes rather than actually using it for what it was intended by the donors.
Source Analysis: The Council on Foreign Relations is a non-partisan, independent “think tank,” and doesn’t promote any one opinion on topics concerning foreign relations. Its members consist of prominent scholars of foreign policy and foreign relations. Seeing as how they don’t seem to have any discernible agenda, other than providing information about foreign relations and holding debates and forums for global leaders, government officials and CFR members, it seems to be a pretty reliable, unbiased source.
Usefulness: This source is kind of perfect for my purposes. It encapsulates both sides of my issue and argues them both effectively. William Easterly is a well-known economist who specializes in growth and foreign aid. He’s a professor at NYU; Co-Director of their Development Research Institute, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institute and a non-resident fellow of the Center For Global Development in D.C. He’s also the associate editor of three different economic journals. Basically, he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to economic growth and foreign aid, so he would be a good source of information about how to stabilize the economy in struggling African nations, and he doesn’t think foreign aid is working. Steven Radelet is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development and former deputy assistant secretary of the U.S. treasury for Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. He argues against Easterly, saying that instead of ignoring when foreign aid works, we should be building on those successes. It also works well because the debaters themselves call each other out on what they aren’t mentioning in their arguments and force each other to defend what they’ve said. This article could be used to effectively argue either side of the question regarding the state department doubling foreign aid.
Works Cited:
CFR.com about page http://www.cfr.org/about/
NYU homepage for William Easterly http://www.nyu.edu/fas/institute/dri/Easterly/
