Foreign Aid

Foreign Aid
Author: Andrew A. Bealinger
Publisher: Nova Publishers
Total Pages: 130
Release: 2006
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9781600210679

Foreign aid has long become a misnomer. It might properly be called 'foreign policy with funds'. Foreign aid packages have become tools to help reign in countries who disagree with this or that foreign policy, to allow leaders of those receiving countries to become privately wealthy and thus beholden to the donor country, and to stipulate that up to 40 per cent of the total 'aid' must be in the form of contracts to companies from the donor country who are often politically tied to the political administration of the donor country. This book provides the background information on important aspects of foreign aid.

Results Not Receipts

Results Not Receipts
Author: Charles Kenny
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
Total Pages: 153
Release: 2017-06-20
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1933286997

In the aftermath of the invasion of Afghanistan, the U.S. Agency for International Development supported the Afghan Ministry of Public Health to deliver basic healthcare to 90 percent of the population, at a cost of $4.50 a head. The program played a vital role in improving the country's health; the number of children dying before the age of five dropped by 100,000 a year. But accounting standards at the Ministry of Public Health concerned the United States Special Investigator General for Afghanistan. There was no evidence of malfeasance, nor argument about the success of the program. For all that the results were fantastic, receipts were not in order. The investigator called for the health program to be suspended because of "financial management deficiencies" at the ministry. This case illustrates a growing problem: an important and justified focus on corruption as a barrier to development has led to policy change in aid agencies that is damaging the potential for aid to deliver results. Donors have treated corruption as an issue they can measure and improve, and from which they can insulate their projects at acceptable costs by controlling processes and monitoring receipts. Results Not Receipts highlights the weak link between donors’ preferred measures of corruption and development outcomes related to our limited ability to measure the problem. It discusses the costs of the standard anti-corruption tools of fiduciary controls and centralized delivery, and it suggests a different approach to tackling the problem of corruption in development: focus on outcomes.

Fighting Fraud and Corruption in the Humanitarian and Global Development Sector

Fighting Fraud and Corruption in the Humanitarian and Global Development Sector
Author: Oliver May
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2016-05-12
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1317032225

There are an estimated 40,000 international Non-Government Organisations (NGOs), working in an enormous global aid industry; official development assistance alone reached £90bn in 2014. This is supplemented by huge voluntary giving – the UK public, for example, give around £1bn a year to overseas causes. These organisations face a unique challenge from fraud and corruption. Operating in the world’s most under-developed and fragile environments, with minimal infrastructure and trust-based cultures, the risk is high. And, being wholly reliant on donors and supporters for income, so are the stakes. Researchers make different estimates of the scale of the problem facing the sector. Some research implies that losses to the global aid budget caused by occupational fraud and abuse may be in the billions of pounds, while those to the British public's voluntary overseas donations could be in the tens of millions. For many sector professionals working in the developing world, these estimates are readily believable. Fighting Fraud and Corruption in the Humanitarian and Global Development Sector by Oliver May is a timely, accessible and relevant how-to guide, which explores the scale and nature of the threat, debunks pervasive myths, and shows readers how to help their NGOs to better deter, prevent, detect and respond to fraud and corruption.

Dead Aid

Dead Aid
Author: Dambisa Moyo
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2009-03-17
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0374139563

Debunking the current model of international aid promoted by both Hollywood celebrities and policy makers, Moyo offers a bold new road map for financing development of the world's poorest countries.

Lords of Poverty

Lords of Poverty
Author: Graham Hancock
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
Total Pages: 258
Release: 1989
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780871134691

"First published in Great Britain in 1989 by Macmillan London Limited"--T.p. verso. Bibliography: p. 195-226.

Corruption and Development in Africa

Corruption and Development in Africa
Author: K. Hope
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 328
Release: 1999-08-18
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0333982444

Bringing together a distinguished cast of contributors, the book provides an authoritative and definitive analysis of the theory, practice and development impact of corruption in Africa. Combating corruption is demonstrated to require greater priority in the quest for African development.

Corruption & Development Aid

Corruption & Development Aid
Author: Georg Cremer
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2008
Genre: Economic assistance
ISBN: 9781588265715

Although corruption has always been a quietly recognized aspect of development aid programs, the taboo against openly discussing it is only now being widely overcome. Georg Cremer systematically addresses the subject, exploring the nature and impact of corruption, the conditions under which it is most likely to take hold, and the strategies that can enable aid organizations, both NGOS and those in the state sector, to limit the risk.

Foreign Aid and Rent-seeking

Foreign Aid and Rent-seeking
Author: Jakob Svensson
Publisher: World Bank Publications
Total Pages: 33
Release: 1998
Genre: Ayuda economica
ISBN:

February 1998 Why has foreign aid had so seemingly poor a macroeconomic impact in many developing countries? Is there a relationship between concessional assistance, widespread corruption, and other types of rent-seeking? To address the relationship between concessional assistance, corruption, and other types of rent-seeking activities, the author provides a simple game-theoretic rent-seeking model. Insights with interesting implications emerge from the analysis: - An increase in government revenue (from windfalls, for example, or from increased foreign aid) does not necessarily lead to the provision of more public goods and in certain circumstances may reduce it. - The mere expectation of aid may suffice to increase rent-dissipation and reduce productive public spending. But if the donor community can enter into a binding policy commitment, this result may be reversed. The author provides some preliminary empirical evidence in support of the hypothesis that windfalls and foreign aid, in countries suffering from a divided policy process, are on average associated with more extensive corruption. He finds no evidence that donors systematically allocate aid to countries with less corruption. The results accords with recent empirical findings that aid is more effective, the greater the effort to direct it to good performers. But such a regime shift may involve an aid policy that in the short run provides more assistance to countries in less need and less aid to those in most need. Enforcing such a regime shift might be difficult. This paper--a product of the Development Research Group--is part of a larger effort in the group to study the effectiveness of foreign aid.

Aid, Predation and State Capture

Aid, Predation and State Capture
Author: Seid Y. Hassan
Publisher:
Total Pages: 45
Release: 2013
Genre:
ISBN:

This article exclusively focuses on theme-based (sector-based) development aid to show the captured nature of foreign aid in Ethiopia and its use of something other than development: penetrate households at the individual level and control them. The paper establishes that, by creating opportunities to the highly organized groups and elites, donor aid has led to a legacy of corruption, maladministration, cruelty, brutality, money laundering and the establishment of a ruthless oligarchy in Ethiopia. I show that the type of corruption which has transpired in Ethiopia is the strongest and highest form of corruption known as State Capture. The work also shows how, when it comes to Ethiopia, donor aid has poisoned the wells with deep corruption and, by implication, the unholy alliance between donor aid and corruption and donor aid and tyranny. The paper documents how various powerful ethnic, social, personal, regional, political and economic groups in Ethiopia are able to extract rents and use it for their own political survival and hegemony. The paper also goes further to show that misusing and abusing of foreign aid by the TPLF/EPRDF is a learned behavior it acquired when it was a guerrilla force. This case study shows that development aid has been overwhelmingly captured by the ruling elites in Ethiopia and consequently, those who are able to capture the foreign aid resources using them as tools of control and repression. In addition to foreign aid being used to finance repression, it has exacerbated the extent and level of the income gaps between the haves and the have-nots while at the same time increasing the vulnerabilities of the poor. Such a scenario and the increased level of rent-seeing that one finds in the country indicates that foreign aid has undermined governance in the country. By exploring the heavy handed use of development aid by the ruling party and the culpability of donors and aid agencies, the paper provides analytical support behind aid and corruption, aid and extraction of rents and the type of corruption that one finds in the country. The paper concludes development aid has been a curse and both Ethiopia and its people would have been better off without foreign aid than with it.