from The Folly of the 0.7% Foreign-Aid Solution by Ian Birrell in the WSJ:

Yet this concept is increasingly discredited in both donor and recipient countries. Study after study has found aid to be ineffective and even counterproductive: Big flows of foreign money fuel corruption, fan conflict and undermine democracy by encouraging poorer countries to place more emphasis on donor demands than on the desires of their people.

The latest one-time believer to turn against what he calls the “aid illusion” is Angus Deaton, an economics professor at Princeton University and a leading expert on measuring global poverty. “We should not be running our aid policies to keep an aid industry going and let them have moral superiority over the rest of us,” he told me.

If Western politicians want to buy virtue by helping the developing world, they should tear down the walls of trade protection, tackle the tides of dirty money that undermine democracy, loosen immigration controls so people can go abroad to earn and send home remittances, and invest in fighting diseases that kill poor people. But please stop posing as saviors of the poor by promoting an absurd, outdated and destructive target of scattering 0.7% of a developed nation’s wealth every year abroad and calling that a cure for the world’s ills.

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