Skip to main content

Economic Aid to Developing Countries - The Stats

World economics has been an interest of mine for a long time and I will start blogging about it here. Questions like how and if the US can continue its dominance and prosperity, what role China and India will play in the world and what the future holds for the likes of Ethiopia and Eritrea fascinate and worry me quite a bit. To the best of my non-economist abilities, I will address these questions in the future.

My first entry derives some general conclusions from statistics on economic aid from developed countries to developing and third-world countries that I found on BBC.


It is no surprise the US leads in this category and a better measure of generosity would be one where the amount of aid is given as a percentage of the country's GDP or revenues. Considering this aid is coming from governments as opposed to NGO's, it would be more informative to calculate this aid as a percentage of a government's revenue. Unfortunately, what BBC reports is the amount of aid as a percentage of a nation's GDP. Oh well ... In fact using the GDP instead of revenues is not so bad considering these countries unanimously practice free market economy despite perhaps slight differences in the role of the central government and taxation rules.


Hail the Scandinavians (and the Dutch)!! I have always known they were most devoted to helping mobilize poor countries out of the hole. What's more amazing is that these countries have had no colonial ambition or base in the world, yet they do the most to help. I was mildly impressed with France and England's contributions, but it probably has a lot to do with their close relationships with their vast ex-colonies. On the flip side, countries like Germany, Japan, US and Italy, who did not have a great colonial base and ambitions in the early 1900s contribute a much smaller portion.

While I lack more complete statistics to comment much on most of these countries, the ($19 billion) 0.16% the US gives is atrocious . In comparison, the government tax revenue is $2200 billion, its GDP is $13000 billion, its defense budget is $350 billion, the war in Iraq costs $100-200 billion every year, and Bush has given 10 year tax cuts of $120+ billion/year ... and the list goes on. So, helping poorer countries does not seem to be much of a priority for the US government, unless there is a political motivation as is the case with Egypt and Israel who get $3 billion/year aid from the US.

I believe the American people are much more generous than their government and I look forward to stats showing the contribution of American NGOs to poor countries.


Well, it is good to see increasing aid even though the rate of its growth and its real impact in the face of inflation and other factors is hard to gauge for me.


It is encouraging the aid is going to places that need it most, namely Africa and Asia.
Comment 4


Way to make an embarrassing entrance, Ethiopia and Eritrea!! Ethiopia has historically been a magnet for foreign aid, even though the impact of the aid has usually been fairly dim. Eritrea, on the other hand, has been a country preaching self-reliance to the point of evicting many NGOs and enforcing strict cash-for-work policies to those that remained. The Eritrea government's ulterior motives aside, I would argue that these stats don't reflect direct foreign aid to Eritrea, but probably the 2% income tax the Eritrean government charges Eritreans in exile, which exceed well over 20% of the population. But then, what do I know ...


Figures from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/05/business_aid_and_development/html/1.stm

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Slow Acroread Startup in OpenSuSe 11.0

It takes more than 30 seconds for acroread to load on my Opensuse machine the first time and the startup time gets shorter in subsequent attempts. Why? This is not the first time I have come across this problem of slow application startups in OpenSuse. Apparently a lot of people had encountered this problem and they found a simple solution - uninstalling the version of acroread that comes with OpenSuse and installing one from Adobe site yourself. Fortunately, that prescription seems to have solved the problem. My acroread startup time is a few seconds now. Why does a very good Linux distribution like OpenSuse with its wide support and following make so many of these mistakes?!?! Over the years, I have seen Suse/OpenSuse sending buggy distributions that make you wonder if they do much testing before releasing their distro. Here are a few bugs I have come across: The extremely slow startup of Openoffice in OpenSuse 10.0 was one of the reasons I switched to Fedora Core for a while...

The Pervasive Mac vs. Windows vs. Linux Analogy

I'm sure everyone has seen the Mac vs. PC ads on TV where the Mac appears to be confident while th PC is in denial about its deficiencies. Missing from that picture is Linux which is robust, but seeks no attention because it has no commercial ambitions. This Mac vs. PC vs. Linux model can serve as a analogy for many things/phenomena. I would like to make a list of those analogies here. For example, The New York Times recently characterized Hillary as a PC and Obama as a mac on the basis of the design of their websites. The analogy would also work if you think of Hillary as the status quo much like Windows, and Obama as the new thing with great promise, cachet and appeal like the newly reborn mac. It is not obvious who would play the role of Linux, but my choice would be Ron Paul. He has some bold and independent ideas along with a very loyal following even though he has no chance of winning. PC Mac Linux Candidate Hillary Clinton Barack Obama Ron Paul States Northeast West Co...

Movies for the Idle Mind

Wondering how I fill my idle hours and days? Among other things, I watch a few movies here and there. Here is a list I downloaded using Bittorrent and am watching at the pace of a movie non-enthusiast. The rating for the movies I have already watched are shown while it is left empty for the others. Woody Allen:: # MOVIE MY RATING ( /10) 1 Annie Hall 10 2 Manhattan 8 3 Hannah and Her Sisters 9 4 Love and Death 8 5 Deconstructing Harry 6 6 Match Point 5 7 Antz 8 8 Play it Again, Sam 8 9 Husbands and Wives 10 The Purple Rose of Cairo 11 Everything You Wanted to Know about Sex, But Were Afraid To Ask OTHER:: # MOVIE MY RATING ( /10) 1 Citizen Kane 7 2 Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind 9 3 The Pursuit of Happyness 6 4 About Schmidt 5 5 The Royal Tenenbaums 10 6 Rushmore 7 7 The Big Lebowski 9 8 Monty Python and the Holy Grail 7 9 Ed Wood 8 10 Broken Flowers 8 11 Basketball Diaries 8 12 Crash 13 The Clockwork Orange 14 City of God 15 The Science of Sleep 16 La Dolce Vita 17...