Juan

I agree with you a hundred per cent that something urgent has to be done about poverty, especially as regards the billion people who are undernourished (see the pamphlet I recently published on this – http://is.gd/lZbe). In particular, I agree with your implied comment that we ought to spend more on emergency relief than we currently do – I think humanitarian assistance is one of the most effective parts of the aid system, and it’s a complete scandal that so many humanitarian appeals go consistently and chronically underfunded (see my previous fan mail to WFP – http://is.gd/lZhG).

But in the broader sense, I do worry that we risk falling into the classic trap of throwing money at the problem if we’re not crystal clear about what we expect to achieve with the money we spend, or about the circumstances in which different aid modalities work (see previous posts on that theme here: http://is.gd/lZcH).

You say that you don’t worry if aid spending levels are arbitrary, and implicitly assume that more must necessarily be needed. Perhaps that’s an admirable sentiment – but it still leaves open two questions:

a) What about the proportion of the population (the majority, I suspect) who aren’t as enlightened as you? If you want to see more aid spent, then don’t you by extension also have an interest in making sure that they remain bought in to the same objective – and hence on winning the argument that the amount you want to see spent on aid has some proper evidence basis?

b) More seriously, perhaps, if you’re not worried about how the ‘total aid required’ figure is worked out, then by extension you’re also not clear about how much aid will work, where, and in what governance contexts – and hence you run the risk of achieving actively counterproductive outcomes. What if you’re giving huge amounts of budget support to a parasitic patronage system that fails to benefit the poor, and means the elite doesn’t need to worry about what its citizens think because it doesn’t depend on their tax? This is by no means a purely academic concern – especially when it’s widely recognised that what gets you promoted in (say) the World Bank is getting money out of the door, rather than any particular outcome for that money.

You say it’s shameful to question 0.7 in the name of efficiency or transparency. Fair enough. But what about doing so in the name of effectiveness – when the risks of getting it wrong are making things worse than they might have been without any aid at all? The only thing that would be shameful in that situation would be to keep on spending the cash regardless, without stopping to face uncomfortable questions.

All best,

Alex

PS: I usually dont comment in these types of fora but this time I felt move to. Thanks for contributing to this useful web page anyway.

Best,

Juan