Where Does American Foreign Aid Go?
A brilliant graphic (that illustrates the sad reality that it is neither the poorest nor the neediest that receive US foreign aid):
Question worth considering:
What if America redirected $3-4 billion from the Middle East towards the poorer countries in the Western hemisphere (Central America/Caribbean)?
If the poorer regions in America’s own backyard developed quickly, the problem of illegal/low-skilled migration would largely disappear. Instead of sending billions to far-off countries in the Middle East, it makes strategic and moral sense for the US to send foreign aid to poor central American countries. It is not clear why the US is still so involved in the Middle East given that it is now a major oil producer and exporter.
Southern Border Crisis Will End When Central America Prospers
The Economist on recent research findings related to foreign aid and development:
Empirical evidence on foreign aid effectiveness
A Rethink of the entire US foreign aid program may be warranted.
Davidson notes -
“For decades, grand theories were developed in rich countries about how to alleviate poverty, and huge amounts of money were spent, with stunningly little regard for their actual impact. There was the big-push model, the dual-sector model, the critical minimum effort, the Fei-Ranis surplus-labor model, capital accumulation, capacity building and, widely adopted and then thoroughly repudiated, the Washington Consensus. Each theory promised an elegant, compelling solution to world poverty. Each has fallen short, in many cases making poor people worse off. …
Alex Thier, head of policy at U.S.A.I.D., told me the agency has begun to experiment with such programs through its Global Development Lab. Moreover, he said, the agency is now making it a priority that poor recipient countries should play a much bigger role in deciding how aid money is spent. A vast majority of American and world aid, however, is still delivered according to wildly outdated models. It often seems designed to help American foreign-policy goals as much as the poor, disproportionately going to geopolitically important countries — Afghanistan, Iraq, Jordan, Pakistan. Also, there is a powerful political system supporting the ways aid is allocated. For example, lobbyists for American farmers and shipowners have kept in place an absurd law that requires much of the emergency food aid sent to crisis-racked countries to come from American farms and be carried by American ships.”
Shifting the Foreign Aid Paradigm— Paying for Outcomes by William Savedoff, Rita Perakis, and Beth Schwanke