admin September 12th, 2011
A new report produced by Eurodad – the European Network on Debt and Development – shows that $69 billion spent on official development aid each year goes straight back to the donor country in the form of contracts for its private sector companies. This is more than half of the total spend on development aid.
This means that companies in the developed countries of the North benefit massively from the aid that their governments are giving to the poorer countries of the South.
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Tags: Eurodad, Trade not Aid
admin May 31st, 2010
ONE, the organisation founded by Bono, Bob Geldof and others, delivered its 2010 Data Report last week. Much was made in the press of its praise of the UK and condemnation of Italy for respectively hitting and nowhere near hitting their aid targets.
But the real elephant in the room got relatively little notice. Almost nothing has been done since the Gleneagles G8 summit in 2005 on the question that most holds back real economic progress in Africa – grossly unfair trade rules and tariff barriers imposed by the industrialised North on the developing countries of the South.
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Tags: Bob Geldof, Bono, G7, G8, Gleneagles, ONE, Rwanda, Trade not Aid
admin January 10th, 2010
Excuse the tabloid style headline on this post, but when an eminent academic economist produces evidence that, despite the influx of billions of dollars of aid – some of which, of course, flowed out just as quickly to Swiss bank accounts – sub-Saharan Africa has gone backwards over the period 1970-2000 it merits a ‘shock horror’ type of response.
Not that sub-Saharan Africa is alone amongst poor regions in getting poorer. Or that, here at Advance Aid, we are that surprised, pushing as we are the view that ‘Trade not Aid’ is the answer to getting real development moving in Africa.
The analysis has been carried out by Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta, Frank Ramsey Professor of Economics and Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge and has been recently published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society under the title ‘Nature’s role in sustaining economic development’. Interested readers can download a copy of the full paper here. It’s well worth a read.
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Tags: Bangladesh, China, Human Development Index, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sub-Saharan Africa, Sustainable development, Trade not Aid
admin September 7th, 2009
Back in July David Dickie spoke at the International Aid & Trade event, held this year in Washington, DC.
He was on a panel chaired by the BBC’s Brian Hanrahan alongside representatives of the American Red Cross, Transparency International, Trade Without Borders and the Millennium Challenge Corporation.
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Tags: Environmental impact, Local manufacturing, Trade not Aid