I’ll be using percentage of GDP as a metric of how stingy countries are when it comes to foreign aid. Some may criticise this metric, but it is the only sensible metric to use … and indeed someone has already looked at the percentage of GDP question and more or less come down on the side of saying that it’s probably the best metric available<\/em>. See here<\/a>.<\/p>\n When looking at the figures, it is worth bearing in mind that the UN has a target of getting the rich to contribute 0.7% of their GDP towards foreign aid. This is a target that was agreed by the rich countries way back in 1970, and has rarely been met. Stealing an image from another web page<\/a> :-<\/p>\n I would rather have included just the second graph which is the important one, but the first allows me to make a point about absolute aid monetary values. It allows the US to hide it’s\u00a0stinginess\u00a0behind it’s absolute value of donations – it looks<\/em>\u00a0generous, but the true story is hidden behind the size of the US. For instance, you could more accurately compare (in absolute terms) the donations by the US with Europe as a whole – if you add up the value donated by the next three largest contributors (all in Europe), you get a value of approximately $39 billion – way more than the US, and the contributions from less wealthy European countries would make the US even more stingy.<\/p>\n I’m picking on the US here simply because it is one of the stingiest rich countries around, but very few countries reach or exceed the UN target of 0.7% of GDP. Only 5 out of 23 countries (22%) meet or exceed the UN target. Or in other words, 78% of the listed countries have not met a target they are obligated to have met by the mid-1970s!<\/p>\n And before anyone mentions that this is because of the current economic climate, bear in mind that foreign aid budgets have increased<\/em>\u00a0since the banking crisis – over time, the rich countries have accumulated a “debt” of some $4.1 trillion dollars representing the shortfall between what they have promised and what they actually give.<\/p>\n Or in other words it’s not “enough already”, but we have fallen a long way short of what we promised to do – except for a tiny minority (that 22% who exceed the target are all quite small countries). It may well be that some foreign aid is wasted, but that is a topic for another time – a time after<\/em>\u00a0the UK has reached the 0.7% target (it is currently 0.56% of GDP).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Given the current situation in Eastern Africa, it is about time to come up with a few words about foreign aid … specifically the amount that each country contributes towards foreign aid. There is plenty of suspicion that some countries are not contributing their fair share – indeed some countries have promised aid and then […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3],"tags":[629,860,129],"class_list":["post-1878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-europe","tag-foreign-aid","tag-us","category-3-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1f2KI-ui","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1878"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1878\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1882,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1878\/revisions\/1882"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Graph](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/cdn1.globalissues.org\/i\/aid\/2011\/net-oda-2010.png?w=695\")
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