Huffing and puffing over aid

After four years of being tube-fed international development discourse, it quickly became obvious to me that the aid debate is one of academia's favourite varieties.  Apparently, the popular media has also picked up a taste for it as of late; of particular note is the cyber-spar that recently occurred between Jeffrey Sachs and Dambisa Moyo, two "household names" of development economics (OK, so the classification's slightly absurd - bear with me).  Sachs' contribution to the Huffington Post is a layman-friendly introduction to his conviction of the need for development assistance, which he defends primarily by pointing out the flawed positions of aid skeptics such as Moyo and William Easterly.  Moya responds in an equally terse fashion, suggesting that the confrontation at hand is only the most recent in a history of editorial animosity.

I'd like to start off by saying that my opinion of Sachs has been slow to galvanize.  Likely, this is due to the circumstances in which I've been exposed to him: aside from the occasional required-reading snippet, I wasn't exposed to his work until I cracked The End of Poverty on a rambunctious riverboat floating down the Laotian Mekong, the "crew" of which were constantly supplying debauched British backpackers with local moonshine.  Needless to say, Jeff came off as a bit dull in comparison.  

As I got more into it, though, I started to recognize qualities that also come through in the discussed article: although he is a committed free-market economist, Sachs recognizes the role that non-reciprocal financial interactions have to play in improving the prospects of developing countries.  Whether it's the forgiveness of debt or the provision of aid, offerings of resources that don't need to be paid back play an important role in increasing the capacity of countries to help themselves.  Sachs is insightful in pointing out that these resources are often the capital upon which countries like Rwanda build effective health infrastructures; he is even more profound in emphasizing that aid funds represent the immediate lifeline to millions on the brink of demise.  Although the article doesn't include the case studies and statistics to prove Sachs' points in and of itself, it serves as a useful call-to-action to Westerners to rethink their meagre contributions to global welfare.

Conversely, I found Moya's response to be smug, trite, and bordering on naive.  Her assertion that "development is not that hard" is enough to propel any development practitioner's head towards the wall, and serves to solidify her place amongst the ranks of one-dimensional conventional economists.  Although we can certainly take hints from past work in areas such as poverty alleviation, the "300 years of evidence" that she refers to is hardly the panacean canon that she makes it out to be.  Sachs knows as well as anyone that certain strategies, such as curbing inflation, have been, historically, applied with similar success in different contexts; however, he would also acknowledge that a smorgasbord of socio-economic-cultural factors come into play when these types of plans are actually implemented.  Moya displays her ignorance to this key historical fact, by attributing the effectiveness of the Marshall Plan and India's Green Revolution primarily to their brevity.

Moya's disciplinary tunnel-vision is further confirmed in her myopic diagnosis of Africa's problems of corruption and economic regression.  Although it is likely true that, in some cases, aid monies have been manipulated fraudulently by crooked officials, the conversation isn't complete unless problems such as poor transparency and judicial independence are mentioned.  The immense sums that Nigerian leaders have historically siphoned out of that country's oil industry is evidence that governments have the potential to be massively corrupt, regardless of whether the money comes from foreign sources or their own wellspring.  As for her claims that Africa is worse off now than in the 1970's, she conveniently fails to mention the effects that AIDS and economic structural adjustment programs alone have had on the continent's ills (ironically, SAP's - facilitated largely by Moya's ex-employer, the World Bank - were characterized by the kind of rapid free-marketization that she espouses).  

All in all, it seems to me that Moya is far more stubbornly attached to her ideology of African self-sufficiency than Sachs is to the idea of the importance of aid, as she alleges.  As far as I can tell, her claims that he neglects job creation in favour of aid-dependency in Africa are wholly unsubstantiated when this article and The End of Poverty are considered.  Although I'm horribly under-qualified to make any type of economic assessment on my own, it seems likely that the differences between Sachs' recommendations for Eastern European development and that of Africa are based on a recognition of the different socio-political-cultural conditions within those areas - exactly the type of broad-perspective that Moya has no apparent interest in adopting.  

Although I won't go into them in depth, I think there are also some important philosophical questions that come into play in the aid debate.  They centre largely around the concept of dependence, and whether it really is a bad thing to rely heavily upon another individual, group or country (check out my earlier post, in which I addressed this more generally).  Certainly, history is full of examples where economic powers have created dependence complexes as a means of exploiting weaker regions; however, the basic concept doesn't have to be painted this darkly by default.  Perhaps the acts of giving and receiving aid on an international, governmental scale could contribute to the development of human attitudes of altruism and humility.  There could be something to this; I think it more likely, however, that these attitudes will have to form on individual levels, before they're embodied on such a large scale.