Foreign Aid Resolution Chosen

Announced at NITOC, the coming year’s policy topic will be:

Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially reform its foreign aid.

For those who preferred the infectious disease or environmental convention topics, the good news is that significant U.S. foreign aid assistance focuses on infectious diseases. Consider this from USAID’s health challenge: improving US foreign assistance  (2007):

Yet USAID’s mission in health has often been obscured. Access to basic health care in poor countries, a robust proxy for development, remains unacceptably low, and USAID had little to show for its efforts.3 HIV/AIDS, diarrhoeal diseases, tuberculosis and malaria are the deadliest diseases on the planet, claiming at least 6 million lives each year.4 These infectious diseases are preventable and treatable with increasingly cheap measures. In spite of the near tripling of US foreign assistance from US$10 billion in 2000 to US$27.5 billion in 2005,5 it is not a trivial matter to assess how much was actually spent on combating disease or on health in general.6

In Greening U.S. Foreign Aid through the Millennium Challenge Account (Brookings, 2003) advice to addenvironment to Millennium Challenge Account funding:

Congress should build the MCA’s mission around the broader concept of sustainable development rather than economic growth alone, make environmental protection a priority, and require the MCA to analyze the environmental consequences of its activities.

Here is recent Heritage Fd. foreign aid/environment article (though link seems broken):

Obama’s Radical Climate Change Agenda Driving U.S. Foreign Aid …
President Obama and his congressional allies’ domestic climate change agenda—“cap and trade”—failed in the last Congress due to extensive opposition to its …

Foreign Aid or Foreign Hinderance?

Critics of U.S. foreign aid argue programs often harm people in poor countries, and further that these government to government transfers hinder and disrupt economic development. For example: Reliance on foreign aid hinders development – Professor Gyan Baffour (GhanaWeb, 6 November 2017)

The President of the Republic of Ghana, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, has cautioned developing countries against relying on foreign aids as he asserts that it is a hindrance to development.

In a speech read on his behalf by the Minister for Planning, Prof. Gyan Baffour, at the 38th CATA Technical Conference, the President said that developing countries, who are members of the Commonwealth, are likely to undermine their development if they are always calling on developed countries for assistance.

Recent Economic Thinking posts on the foreign aid resolution:

• Problems, Benefits, and Reform for U.S. Foreign Aid (May 1, 2018)

• West Africa Trade, Aid, Conflict, Fish, and Health (May 9, 2018) (begins with discussion of proposed NCFCA topic on U.S./West Africa policy)

• Topic Notes: Infectious Diseases, Environmental Issues, and Foreign Aid (April 29, 2018)

Here is an article on a foreign aid transparency bill in Congress, Congress is actually working together on something: reforming foreign aid (Vox, January 15, 2016):

The [Foreign Aid Transparency and Accountability Act’s] broad appeal can be explained in part by the innocuousness of its goal. The bill doesn’t try to start new transparency or evaluation initiatives; rather, it makes permanent many of the efforts to make foreign aid programs more evidence-based begun by Obama’s former US Agency for International Development (USAID) administrator Raj Shah, a figure who is beloved on Capitol Hill by members of both parties…

Here is link to Poverty, Inc. page (also in earlier post), and below is trailer on YouTube: