Fortsätt till huvudinnehåll

Giving aid to poor countries

There was an article on this subject in the Guardian today, with reference to India. It begged the perpetual question of precisely who pays and who benefits from aid.

There are many poor people in Britain and most other "first world countries". This is due to maldistribution. Because of the way tax structures are loaded against them, the poor in the rich countries contribute disproportionately to any aid that comes from their governments.

Conversely, there are plenty of wealthy people in "poor" countries. Indeed, some "poor" countries are blessed with great natural resources such as mineral wealth and the problem is one of distribution within the countries concerned.

It is also the case that the main beneficiaries of aid from "rich" countries to "poor" ones tend to be the wealthy people in the poor countries. There is no "trickle-down" mechanism. Again, there is maldistribution.

Ultimately, the problem can be resolved only by the people in the countries with the problems. Aid from governments can exacerbate the problems or delay the time when people actually get to grips with them intelligently.

This raises a further question. Given the marked failure of most "rich" countries to prevent undue and now growing inequalities, and the historic failure of socialist measures to address the problem either, it is evident that current accepted economic theory is not up to the task of explaining what is happening. Consequently, governments who genuinely wished to address the problem have no means of developing and evaluating policies that might be effective.

In the circumstances, the best that people in "rich" countries can do is to support the better charities, those which devote their efforts to front-line work rather than misguided political campaigning. Government should keep out of the picture.

Kommentarer

Populära inlägg i den här bloggen

The dreadfulness of British governance

I wrote to my MP on two entirely separate issues recently. The first was to do with the replacement for the Inter City 125 train, which at £2.6 million per vehicle, is twice as expensive as it ought to be. The second concerned the benefits of a switch from business rate and Council Tax to a tax based on site values. In both cases, the replies were full of spurious, unsubstantiated assertions and completely flawed arguments. This is typical. You will not get an iota of sense from the government on any area of public policy at all - finance, economics, trade and employment, agriculture, housing, health, transport, energy. All junk. If you write to your MP you will invariably receive answers that are an insult to your intelligence, no matter what subject you are writing about. Of course they cannot understand statistics. They are innumerate. Whitehall is staffed with idiots with a high IQ. Look at their IT projects. And mind your purse, they will have that too.

How much more will the British tolerate?

The British are phlegmatic, tolerant and slow to rouse. Thus there was no great reaction after the terrorist attack in July 2005. The murder of Lee Rigby created a sense of outrage, but nothing more, since it appeared to be an isolated incident. Two serious incidents within a fortnight are another matter. Since the first major terrorist incident in 2001, authority has tried to persuade the public that Islam is a religion of peace, that these were isolated events, or the actions of deranged "lone wolves", having nothing to do with Islam, or to reassure that the chances of being killed in a terrorist attack were infinitesimally small. These assurances are are beginning to wear thin. They no longer convince. If government does not act effectively, people will take the law into their own hands. What, however, would effective action look like? What sort of effective action would not amount to rough justice for a lot of innocent people? Given the difficulties of keeping large n...

Battery trains fool’s gold

A piece by the railway news video Green Signals recently reported the fast charging trials for battery operated electric trains on the West Ealing to Greenford branch, in west London. In a comment under the video, I described the project as technological overkill, bearing in mind that before dieselisation in the 1960s it was worked by the tiny steam locomotives of the Great Western 1400 class, a 1932 design based on an 1870s design. The money that has been spent on the experiment would have paid for a small fleet of the old things. Elsewhere in the comments, I was critical of the 800 series trains. This produced a response from the makers of the video, as follows. “I may be grasping at straws here but I am guessing you don't like 8xx series trains all that much and rather wish we still had Kings, Castles and (for the branches) 14xx's. Fair? ” My reply was as follows... Yes you are grasping at straws. The model for long distance stock is the class 180, which is a 23 metre veh...