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
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Recent Posts
Recent Comments
- Jeffrey K. Silverman on Statement from CARE on Bruckner FOIA Request: I hope that OIG is reading some of these postings, especially about...
- Jeffrey K. Silverman on NGO Transparency: Counterpart International to release budget: That might be giving AEI too much credit, and it...
- AA on IAD on A-i-d: @ Tulip: Your comment about rich taxpayers driving aid policy may be true for Europeans, but I see some trouble with...
- Jim on Africans do not want or need Britain’s development aid: The statistics posted by Terence are fascinating. If Bill Easterly...
- Katrina on Be Careful What You Export: Brendon, I think the NHS is a good boiler plate model that can be tinkered. I’m in Uganda...
- edinburgh photograph on Statement from CARE on Bruckner FOIA Request: Great favorite is usually most definitely the idea is usually these...
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
- IAD on A-i-d http://bit.ly/9Yqk1H. Claudia Williamson discusses Elinor Ostrom's work on development. 12:29:51 PM September 03, 2010 from web
- Be Careful What you Export: http://bit.ly/cE3e1v 11:11:33 AM September 02, 2010 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
Category Archives: Aid policies and approaches
IAD on A-i-d
This post is by Claudia Williamson, a post-doctoral fellow at DRI.
In The Samaritan’s Dilemma: The Political Economy of Development Aid, Elinor Ostrom and other members of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University apply Ostrom’s Nobel Prize-winning Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) theoretical framework to development aid, specifically examining Sweden’s development agency, SIDA.
The IAD framework begins by analyzing the local context governing individual decision-making and…
Also posted in Academic research
3 Comments
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
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The Lives of Others
UPDATE: contrasting negative images offered by commentators on Twitter (see end of post)
My Ghanaian friends often tell me that if you want to understand Ghanaians at all, you have to understand how religious are most Ghanaians. I believed them of course, but it didn’t really become vivid until I attended the most amazing church service this morning. I am not saying this out of any religious motives, just to point out another side of…
Also posted in Field notes
Tagged aid policies/approaches, aid recipients, Ghana, Religion
32 Comments
Separating the wax from the gold: social accountability in Ethiopia
This post was written by Helen Epstein, author of The Invisible Cure: Why We Are Losing the Fight Against AIDS.
I was heartened to see that Shanta Devarajan, the World Bank’s Chief Economist for Africa, blogged about my article Cruel Ethiopia in the New York Review of Books.
The article—and Dr. Devarajan’s blog—deal with the extremely delicate and complex relationship between economic and social development and human rights. He and I agree that there…
Also posted in Accountability & transparency, Books and book reviews, Human rights
Tagged Helen Epstein, Social Accountability, World Bank
7 Comments
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…
Also posted in Accountability & transparency, In the news
Tagged India, Right-to-Know Law
8 Comments
Troubled Water
A new Frontline segment investigates one of its own stories from 2005, a report on a child-powered merry-go-round that acts as a water pump. At the time, the PlayPump seemed an innovative, clever way to increase the clean water supply in African villages.
After FRONTLINE/World first aired the story in 2005, major donors in the United States — and the U.S. government itself — launched a multimillion-dollar campaign to install the device in thousands of
…
FT: Celebrities urge G8 to make new unkept promises to keep previous unkept promises
Oh how we wish it would be otherwise! What will it take?
Alan Beattie writes on the G8 in the FT:
It stretches the most elastic mind to envisage the collective wrath of Scarlett Johansson, Annie Lennox, Bill Nighy, Kristin Davis and Her Majesty Queen Rania of Jordan, but it descended on the heads of the Group of Eight this weekend.
The obsolescence of the G8 has long been discussed during interminable and inconclusive international
…
US food aid policies create 561 jobs in Kansas, risk millions of lives around the world
I read recently the First Law of Policy Economics: Every inefficiency is someone’s income.
US food aid policy is definitely no exception, and it is riddled with inefficiencies.
Exhibit A: This invitation from a coalition of big US shipping interests to an event in Washington today. At this event, USA Maritime will have tried to convince lawmakers and their staff that ancient and outdated US food aid legislation, which requires virtually all US food aid…
Also posted in Disaster/ humanitarian aid, Political economy, Trade
Tagged food aid, Food for Peace, GAO, iron triangle, USA Maritime
18 Comments
Response to Dani Rodrik on Washington Consensus
Dani gives a response to some “counter-arguments” against his post favoring Import-substituting Industrialization (ISI) over Washington Consensus (WC) that had mysteriously “resuscitated” themselves after they “had long been laid to rest.” I appreciate Dani’s courtesy in not identifying the culprits in this misguided resuscitation of long-dead counterarguments, but it does make it a little difficult to carry on a precise debate. It’s possible that my post about skill vs. luck, and the comments…
Also posted in Economics principles
Tagged Dani Rodrik, Import-substituting Industrialization, Washington Consensus
8 Comments
The World Bank’s “horizontal” approach to health falls horizontal?
The history of foreign aid for global health has seen a cycling back and forth between two alternative approaches. The “vertical” approach focuses on fighting one disease at a time, and in Africa has been very effective in targeting smallpox, Guinea worm, measles, and river blindness, to name a few examples. After large initial successes though, diminishing returns to vertical programs set in. The “horizontal” approach instead invests sector-wide to make health systems work to…