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Aiding And Abetting: Foreign Aid Failures and the 0.7% Deception [Kindle Edition]

Jonathan Foreman
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)

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Book Description

At a time of cuts in public expenditure, Britain's Coalition government is committed not only to maintaining the UK's foreign aid budget but to increasing it, in order to meet the target of 0.7 per cent of GDP, despite opinion polls that show it to be unpopular with the electorate. Jonathan Foreman explains why scepticism about the utility and even morality of much foreign aid is more than justified; why so much of the rhetoric used to justify the UK's lavish aid policy is disingenuous or dishonest; and why 0.7 per cent of GDP is an arbitrary number unconnected with either poor country needs or rich country capability. He argues that after six decades and more than three trillion dollars of official development aid, there is little evidence for its effectiveness. Development aid tends to undermine good government, enrich corrupt tyrants and subsidise warlords rather than promote economic growth. Meanwhile, emergency or humanitarian aid, the imagery of which is used by the aid industry and the government to market all foreign aid, is a much more complicated, difficult and morally problematic activity than its promoters and many practitioners would like the public to know. While government officials claim that British aid benefits the UK as well as its intended recipients, by winning goodwill and by making foreign conflict and mass immigration less likely, there is little or no evidence that any of these claims are true. Foreman does not argue for an end to aid, but rather that it should be reality-based rather than faith-based, i.e. it should rest on realistic calculations about the likely fate of donations to poor country governments, UN agencies, international bureaucracies and large charities. He recommends abandoning the 0.7 per cent target; a Royal Commission to investigate the purpose of foreign aid; shifting up to one third of the aid budget and a significant part of UK emergency aid to those branches of the armed forces which have the capacity to deliver it more effectively than NGOs; and the funding of the BBC World Service from the aid budget.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Jonathan Foreman is a writer, researcher and editor based in London and New Delhi. With an academic background in history and law, his primary areas of interest are urban policy, security and defence, South Asian affairs and film. He is currently co-editor of The Indian Quarterly and a Senior Research Fellow at Civitas. Foreman was one of the founders for the British monthly magazine Standpoint and served as its deputy editor until 2009. In recent years he has reported from Beirut and Mumbai for Standpoint, from Pakistan for the Daily Telegraph Magazine, from Afghanistan for National Review, and from the Chad/Darfur border for Men's Vogue. In 2005 Vanity Fair sent him to Baghdad and Basra to report on Coalition efforts to train Iraqi security forces. He was formerly based in New York, where he was at various times a war correspondent, leader writer and film critic for the New York Post, a contributing editor at the Manhattan Institute's City Journal and a contributing editor at the U.S. National Law Journal. He has written for a variety of publications on both sides of the Atlantic including The New Yorker, The Spectator, The Financial Times, The Sunday Times Magazine, the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, and The First Post.

Product Details

  • File Size: 378 KB
  • Print Length: 249 pages
  • Publisher: Civitas (January 31, 2013)
  • Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
  • Language: English
  • ASIN: B00B9K2W1U
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  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,330,209 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The title comes from the attempt to enshrine in law 0.7% of GDP as the amount to be given in foreign aid by England. Foreman argues against it by using statistics, anecdotes, and history to examine foreign aid by England specifically and other countries in general since the 1950s. The picture he paints is like a van Gogh watercolor in which the outer appearances are abandoned and the inner workings of a subject laid bare.
The author proves that most foreign aid has an inverse result on the ones it allegedly benefits, with corrupt heads of state, bureaucrats, and even local leaders siphoning off the money. Meanwhile, workers in the foreign aid industry carve out comfortable lives as they live as expatriates from nation to nation.
Not that the goals of foreign aid, whether voluntarily by donation or involuntarily by taxation, are not lofty. World leaders at a UN Summit in 2000 pledged to:

1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
2. Achieve universal primary education
3. Promote gender equality and empower women
4. Reduce child mortality rates by two thirds
5. Improve maternal health
6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases
7. Ensure environmental sustainability
8. Develop a global partnership for development
and thereby `end poverty'. This was to be accomplished by
the end of 2015.

The author's tales of misdirected aid are telling. Most damning were the examples of those responsible for genocide receiving foreign aid: leaders, soldiers, and their families after the Rwadan and Bosnian wars of the 1990s. Foreman details how the media and the foreign aid industrial complex co-exist with the former providing reports and stories to ensure the latter's existence. The bibliography is extensive; his argument compelling.
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5.0 out of 5 stars UK foreign aid thoughts January 26, 2014
Format:Kindle Edition|Verified Purchase
Interesting book dealing with plans to increase UK foreign aid and failures over the years, with some recommendations for improvements. Foreign aid falls into the immediate kind of saving people from a drought or the longer term of helping them to improve themselves and their country, and do better long term.

The author looks at what three trillions of dollars over six decades of foreign aid from the countries of the world have done over the years. Unfortunately, the money has accomplished little, except for providing opportunities for selected persons to become rich or in some cases very rich off of stolen foreign aid. Many people and governments around the world have tried to contribute with money and work to helping the poorer countries and peoples of the earth. This book details the problems and failures, and limited successes.

He proposes some limited goals for the future, specifically shifting some of the aid budget to the armed services to administer as being better at it than the family of aid agencies.

A thoughtful book that can help people to understand the foreign air issues, and what the UK should do in the future. The book does not directly apply to the USA, but there are common threads.
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5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars July 20, 2014
Format:Kindle Edition|Verified Purchase
Insightful.
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