Some Unpleasant Facts About Foreign Aid

Quite a good read.

India to Britain: Your Money Is No Good Here – Reason Magazine: The flap between Britain and India shows that foreign aid is about elites, not the poor.
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But the British aid establishment—including the administration of Prime Minister David Cameron, a Conservative—begged India to reconsider. The U.K. Department of International Development pleaded that canceling the aid would cause the British government “grave political embarrassment,” since it had expended significant “political capital” selling it to voters.

In other words, the point of the aid wasn’t to save India’s poor but to save British face. It wasn’t about making India’s impoverished feel better, but making the British establishment feel good.

But if England’s aid is about national aggrandizement, so is India’s refusal to accept it. Even though India has cut the ranks of its poor in half since it liberalized its economy, well over a third of its population lives on less than $1 a day. There are more people living in abject poverty in three Indian states than in all of sub-Saharan Africa.

Tags: Foreign Aid, India