About Aid Watch
The Aid Watch blog is a project of New York University's Development Research Institute (DRI). This blog is principally written by William Easterly, author of "The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics" and "The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good," and Professor of Economics at NYU. It is co-written by Laura Freschi and by occasional guest bloggers. Our work is based on the idea that more aid will reach the poor the more people are watching aid.
“Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.” - H.L. Mencken
-
Recent Posts
Recent Comments
- Rebecca Burlingame on Be Careful What You Export: Oh so true that there are many things the developing world does not want from the...
- Tom on Be Careful What You Export: And that is without even thinking of the material dimension of institutional or organisational...
- Tim on Statement from CARE on Bruckner FOIA Request: Check out who is “Art Keys and Associates” and you will understand how...
- skeptic on Statement from CARE on Bruckner FOIA Request: Umm, why don’t they just release it themselves instead of asking USAID to...
- Andy on Be Careful What You Export: Very true, the lock-in nature of path dependent choices and the increasing returns these paths...
- Debrah Prada on Be Careful What You Export: I hope everyone GOVERNMENT could read this. Very well said.
Archives
Bill Easterly tweets
- Dear Aid Watchers, Laura and I are gone for a week, Adam Martin is Guest Editor, starting with today's great post http://bit.ly/ces1l3 02:12:45 PM August 30, 2010 from bitly
- Have a happy Last Week of the Summer 01:52:50 PM August 30, 2010 from web
- Beloved tweeps: I am going off line for a week in a last-ditch effort to regain my sanity, no more tweets from me till after Labor Day. 01:52:30 PM August 30, 2010 from web
- What to learn from those wacky animal-shaped Sudanese urban plans: rich country urban planners are just as wacky http://bit.ly/ces1l3 01:50:42 PM August 30, 2010 from bitly
Aid Watch tweets
- Be Careful What you Export: http://bit.ly/cE3e1v about 12 hours ago from web
- TransparencyBrawl 2010 continues: http://bit.ly/aG1ytu 08:18:35 PM September 01, 2010 from web
- Hayek vs. the Intellectuals, in technicolor! http://bit.ly/cSnS8m 11:25:39 AM September 01, 2010 from web
- Guest blog by Ben Powell on how to help the poor, just in time for going back to school: http://bit.ly/9pQfhi. 11:18:38 AM August 31, 2010 from web
Author Archives: Laura Freschi
David Rieff takes on Hillary’s “new approach” to Global Health
In a blog post for The New Republic, author David Rieff calls Hillary Clinton’s approach to development naïve, contradictory, and muddled. His post is a response to Clinton’s speech, delivered last week at SAIS, about the administration’s six-year, $63 billion Global Health Initiative.
Rieff’s critique rests on three main arguments, all of which will be familiar to Aid Watch readers.
1) Insisting that development is going to be “elevated” to the level…
Posted in Global health, International organizational behavior, Military aid
Tagged David Rieff, Hillary Clinton
7 Comments
Is it OK to neglect disaster in Pakistan because it’s not a tourist destination? If not, see below
The latest story on the catastrophic flooding in Pakistan is about how it hasn’t been a story.
Compared to the response to the Haitian earthquake, media coverage of the Pakistan floods has been paltry. While news coverage isn’t correlated with need, it does have a major effect on the amount of disaster relief aid given. An article in the Chronicle of Philanthropy yesterday reported that eleven US charities had so far raised only…
Wishful thinking on Pakistan
From last weekend’s New York Times:
As the Obama administration continues to add to the aid package for flood-stricken Pakistan — already the largest humanitarian response from any single country — officials acknowledge that they are seeking to use the efforts to burnish the United States’ dismal image there.…
American officials say they are trying to rekindle the same good will generated five years ago when the United States military played a major role
…
Posted in Aid policies and approaches, Disaster/ humanitarian aid, Military aid
Tagged Pakistan
7 Comments
Why is promising a right to food more politically appealing than delivering that food?
In India, the system that delivers subsidized food and fuel to the nation’s poor is badly broken. Many people who are supposed to receive the subsidized fuel and bags of grain do not, and “studies show that 70 percent of a roughly $12 billion budget is wasted, stolen, or absorbed by bureaucratic and transportation costs.”
This is according to a recent NYT article by Jim Yardley, which frames the current debate about what should…
Posted in Human rights, Poverty
19 Comments
Wyclef Jean for Prez?
In a world where being an actor, a rock star, or sex video vixen is sufficient qualification for people to sit up and pay attention to your ideas about how to solve world poverty, it comes as no great shock that Wyclef Jean has decided to run for President of Haiti. Herewith, we attempt two arguments in favor of the former Fugees frontman’s candidacy, and two against.
In Favor:
- Wyclef Jean demonstrated his impressive
…
Are many dimensions better than one?
Over at From Poverty to Power, Duncan Greene hosted a fiery debate about how best to measure poverty, sparked by the release of the UN’s new Multidimensional Poverty Index.
The new index will complement a simpler method used in the UN Human Development Reports which relies on uniformly-weighted variables measuring life expectancy, education and income. The new method, created by researchers at the University of Oxford, combines ten different variables (including…
Posted in Data and statistics
Tagged Duncan Greene, Gabriel Demombynes, Gates Foundation, Martin Ravallion, United Nations
14 Comments
Can aid win hearts and minds?
A recent Christian Science Monitor article reported that USAID is “losing hearts and minds” in Afghanistan’s northeastern Badakshan province because of failed and shoddy projects, corruption, secrecy and waste.
Given how much of the US aid budget is spent trying to make the world a safer and more secure place for Americans, you might think there would be plenty of studies testing the hypothesis that aid funds can reduce terrorism or shift hostile public…
Posted in Academic research, Military aid
Tagged Afghanistan, Andrew Wilder, Iraq, Pakistan
16 Comments
US gets a strategy to meet the Millennium Development Goals – please explain
UPDATE: UN Dispatch disagrees, we respond (see end of post).
Although the eight goals that seek to reduce the global burden of hunger, poverty and disease were agreed upon by aid donors almost 10 years ago, and most of the goals come due in 2015, the world’s largest donor has never had a strategy to achieve them. Obama campaigned on the promise of making the MDGs “America’s goals,” but the first year and a half…
Posted in Grand plans/ aid targets
Tagged David Hulme, Millennium Development Goals, USAID
8 Comments
The Wellington Dilemma
…[I] request elucidation of my instructions from His Majesty’s Government so that I may better understand why I am dragging an army over these barren plains. I construe that perforce it must be one of two alternative duties, as given below. I shall pursue either with the best of my ability, but I cannot do both:
1.) To train an army of uniformed British clerks in Spain for the benefit of the accountants and copy-boys
…
A spoonful of transparency: good but no cure-all
The New York Times ran a story last week about a five-year-old Indian law that reinforces the right—and sets in place the process—for individuals to request government-held information.
Ms. Chanchala Devi, for example, applied for a government grant she had heard was available to help poor people like her build their own houses. After four years of fruitless waiting, she used India’s Right-to-Know law to request a list of people who had received the…
Posted in Accountability & transparency, Aid policies and approaches, In the news
Tagged India, Right-to-Know Law
8 Comments