Aid
The type of aid given may be classified according to various factors, including its intended purpose, the terms or conditions (if any) under which it is given, its source, and its level of urgency.
[6] The Geneva Conventions give a mandate to the International Committee of the Red Cross and other impartial humanitarian organizations to provide assistance and protection of civilians during times of war.
For donor nations, development aid also has strategic value;[7] improved living conditions can positively effects global security and economic growth.
[10] For the same year, the OECD estimated that six to seven billion dollars of ODA-like aid was given by ten other states, including China and India.
[15] Official development assistance as a percentage of gross national income contributed by the top 10 DAC countries is as follows.
ODA refers to aid from national governments for promoting economic development and welfare in low and middle income countries.
[20] The World Bank reported that, worldwide, foreign workers sent $328 billion from richer to poorer countries in 2008, over twice as much as official aid flows from OECD members.
Van de Walle argues that aid must be made more conditional and selective to incentivize states to take on reform and to generate the much needed accountability and capacity in African governments.
[23] A 2020 article published in Studies in Comparative International Development analyzed contract-level data over the period 1998 through 2008 in more than a hundred recipient countries.
As a risk indicator for corruption, the study used the prevalence of single bids submitted in "high-risk" competitive tenders for procurement contracts funded by World Bank development aid.
"[24] A 2018 study published in the Journal of Public Economics investigated with Chinese aid projects in Africa increased local-level corruption.
For instance, for the case of Colombia Dube and Naidu (2015)[26] showed that Aid from the US seems to have been diverted to paramilitary groups, increasing political violence.
[27] These tools improve the ability of rebel groups to organize and give them assets to trade for arms, possibly increasing the length of the fighting.
[29] Aid has made many African countries and other poor regions incapable of achieving economic growth and development without foreign assistance.
[34] Local farmers end up going out of business because they cannot compete with the abundance of cheap imported aid food, that is brought into poor countries as a response to humanitarian crisis and natural disasters.
[39] Peter Singer argues that over the last three decades, "aid has added around one percentage point to the annual growth rate of the bottom billion."
Jeffery Sachs and his collaborators argue that in order for foreign aid to be successful, policy makers should "pay more attention to the developmental barriers associated with geography specifically, poor health, low agricultural productivity, and high transportation costs".
[43][44] This is partially because aid given in the form of foreign currency causes exchange rate to become less competitive and this impedes the growth of manufacturing sector which is more conducive in the cheap labour conditions.
It makes the takers seem like givers, granting them a kind of moral high ground while preventing those of us who care about global poverty from understanding how the system really works.
During the conflict between communism and capitalism in the twentieth century, the champions of those ideologies – the Soviet Union and the United States – each used aid to influence the internal politics of other nations, and to support their weaker allies.
Perhaps the most notable example was the Marshall Plan by which the United States, largely successfully, sought to pull European nations toward capitalism and away from communism.
[50] Some specific motives a donor may have for giving aid were listed in 1985 as follows: defence support, market expansion, foreign investment, missionary enterprise, cultural extension.
[50]: 251 In recent decades, aid by organizations such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank has been criticized as being primarily a tool used to open new areas up to global capitalists, and being only secondarily, if at all, concerned with the wellbeing of the people in the recipient countries.
Faye and Niehaus discovered that the greater the degree of alignment the recipient party has with the donor entity, the more aid it receives on average during an election year.
[51] In an analysis of the three biggest donor nations (Japan, France, and the US), Alesina and Dollar (2000) discovered that each has its own distortions to the aid it gives out.
[60] An early example of the military type of aid is the First Crusade, which began when Byzantine Greek emperor Alexios I Komnenos asked for help in defending Byzantium, the Holy Land, and the Christians living there from the Seljuk takeover of the region.
Economic historians Bradford De Long and Barry Eichengreen conclude it was, "History's Most Successful Structural Adjustment Program."
They state: For much of the period since World War II to the present "foreign aid was used for four main purposes: diplomatic [including military/security and political interests abroad], developmental, humanitarian relief and commercial.
Many Arab recipient countries have also avoided of speaking on aid openly in order to digress from the idea of hierarchy of Eurocentrism and Wester-centrism, which are in some ways reminders of the colonial pasts.
This is especially true considering the fact that aid by Arab donors is more geographically concentrated, given without conditionality and often to poorest nations in the Middle East and North Africa.
