The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development recently issued a report summarizing the foreign aid activities of its 22 member countries – which includes all of the major foreign aid donors. A group of British PhD candidates who blog on International Political Economy give a very good rundown of the main points.
They focus on the fact that the major donors are not on track to meet the aid targets they set a the G8 summit in 2005. At that time, donors agreed to increase aid to $130 billion (for all donors) by 2010. As of now they are about $38 billion short of that goal.
The report also provides this chart, which tells us how much each OECD member is gave in 2007 as a percentage of their own gross national income.
I’ve got mixed feelings about this methodology. I recognize that it is useful to measure giving by economy size – otherwise a large country like the US will always look like it has no more room to give (the US is the largest donor in dollar terms, but the US economy is so much larger than any individual European country that the % is low).
What I don't like is the UN target of 0.7% of GNI. That number is just so arbitrary. It is based on the assumption that 1% of GNI is the right amount for a wealthy country to give, and that most of that giving “should” be from the government (the remainder should be private aid). But why 1%? How can world need always be equal to 1% of the GNI of wealthy countries? Why are governments necessarily responsible for the lion's share of that? As far as I know, there aren't answers to those questions.
Don't get me wrong. I’m pro-foreign aid, and pro-large government aid budgets. But I don't like arbitrary figures. Giving should be based on some combination of needs and capabilities to use the money – not a number dreamed up at a UN conference 35 years ago. The “right” amount of aid may be more than 1% of GNI, in which case the US (and all but 4 other donor countries) has a lot of work to do.
