“Aid is a bigger curse than oil”

Amity Shlaes writes via Bloomberg:

You get the sense that politicians these days are racing to match Bill and Melinda Gates, Warren Buffett and the rest of the private sector in charity spending… Historians talk about the old scramble for Africa. That was a scramble to get — European monarchs took land for colonies. Now we are witnessing a scramble to give. The new scramble is as much a shame as the old one.

But foreign aid can be the kiss of death for poor regions, as a former World Bank official, William Easterly, demonstrated in his recent book, “The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good.”
Easterly’s research found that $2.3 trillion in aid the U.S. and allies have spent over the past half-century has been a counterproductive distraction from achieving stable growth.

Others scholars agree as well, using data from more than 100 countries spanning over four decades, some scholars show “aid tends to supplant growth and makes countries quantifiably less democratic. They compared aid with petroleum wealth. Based on their research, they determined, ‘aid is a bigger curse than oil.’”

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