Does Foreign Aid Really Work?

Front Cover
OUP Oxford, Aug 7, 2008 - Business & Economics - 536 pages
Foreign aid is now a $100bn business and is expanding more rapidly today than it has for a generation. But does it work? Indeed, is it needed at all? Other attempts to answer these important questions have been dominated by a focus on the impact of official aid provided by governments. But today possibly as much as 30 percent of aid is provided by Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), and over 10 percent is provided as emergency assistance. In this first-ever attempt to provide an overall assessment of aid, Roger Riddell presents a rigorous but highly readable account of aid, warts and all. Does Foreign Aid Really Work? sets out the evidence and exposes the instances where aid has failed and explains why. The book also examines the way that politics distorts aid, and disentangles the moral and ethical assumptions that lie behind the belief that aid does good. The book concludes by detailing the practical ways that aid needs to change if it is to be the effective force for good that its providers claim it is.
 

Contents

LIST OF TABLES
A good thing?
The origins and early decades of aidgiving
Aidgiving from the 1970s to the present
The growing web of bilateral aid donors
The impact of official development aid projects
The impact of programme aid technical assistance and aid for capacity
The impact of aid at the country and crosscountry level
Assessing the impact of aid conditionality
Does official development aid really work? A summing
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About the author (2008)

Roger Riddell is a Non-Executive Director of Oxford Policy Management and a Principle of The Policy Practice. He was Chair of the first Presidential Economic Commission of Independent Zimbabwe in 1980, and Chief Economist of the Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries from 1981-83. From 1984 to 1998, he was a senior Research Fellow at the Overseas Development Institute, London and for five years to 2004 was International Director of Christian Aid.