by Andy Sumner | Oct 5, 2011 | Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Economics and development, Global system
The ‘traditional’ foreign aid donors (aka the OECD DAC) released it’s latest report (here) and stats on aid (here) this week. This is of course amid different debates each side of the Atlantic (the UK’s 40% increase in aid amid major public spending cuts and the US aid cuts that the NY times reported on here with infographic here).
So, what does this week’s report and new data say on who spends what on aid?
A very quick ‘3 take-ways’ run down:
First, who get’s most OECD DAC aid?
A rather strange top 10 rather unevenly linked to poverty or income levels:
Turkey, Pal, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Serbia, Morocco, Sudan, DRC, Ukraine, Egypt…
What kind of countries get aid most?
55% goes to low income countries; 45% to middle-income countries.
Finally, which countries are aid dependent?
Surprisingly, not as many as you’d think if one takes 5% or 10% of GNI (gross national income) in ODA (overseas dev assistance) for medium and high aid dependency.
What to make of all this? How closely are poverty and aid linked?
The world’s poor live in 3 places:
1. Half of world’s poor are in China and India – these countries (arguably) have sufficient resources and in fact are both foreign aid donors themeselves – aid to China and India is probably in the shared endeavour of global public goods, possibly concessional loans.
2. A quarter of poor live in other lower middle income countries (MICs) – again plenty of domestic resources here so no real need for lots of aid but many of these are also fragile states or have governance issues – Pakistan and Nigeria – that no one knows quite how to intervene (see some thoughts here).
3. And a quarter of worlds poor are low income countries (LICs) who unequivocally need aid but most LICs will be lower MICs in next decade so what happens to aid after that?
This all leaves aid in need of an overhaul I think (see aid 2.0 post here).
Maybe aid needs a rethink with objectives related to insuring against new global risks – climate adaptation, financial instability for example or tried and tested poverty interventions such as conditional cash transfers direct to the poor?
Happy to hear views below…
by Richard Gowan | Oct 5, 2011 | Africa, Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, East Asia and Pacific, Europe and Central Asia, Global system, Middle East and North Africa, North America
It turns out that my last post on the Security Council and Syria was wrong.
Exceptionally wrong, in fact.
Rather than acquiesce to a resolution condemning the Syrian government for repressing its people, China and Russia used their vetoes. And rather than support the EU-drafted resolution (as had seemed increasingly likely) Brazil, India and South Africa abstained.
This is a big set-back for the EU and the Americans, who were firmly behind the European initiative. It’s a big win for Russia, which would have been embarrassed if China had even abstained. And it’s a grim moment for Brasilia, Delhi and Pretoria, who have missed the chance to carve out a distinctive position in the Council on Syria, and opted to avoid a confrontation. This was a moment the “IBSA” countries could have seized to show why they deserved more respect at the UN. They missed it.
More analysis tomorrow. For now, congratulations to Gabon and Nigeria for voting for the resolution, refuting the claim that all developing countries are anti-interventionist.
by Richard Gowan | Oct 4, 2011 | Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, East Asia and Pacific, Global system, Latin America and the Caribbean, Middle East and North Africa, South Asia
It now looks like the Security Council will vote on a (still too weak) resolution demanding the end of the Syrian crackdown today or tomorrow. Russia is still bad-mouthing the proposal, drafted by the Council’s European members, but other powers are lining up to back it. Brazil – previously numbered among opponents of a resolution along with China, India and South Africa – looks like it’s on board:
In a joint statement issued the same day European nations were to seek a vote on a UN Security Council resolution condemning Syria’s crackdown on protests, EU leaders and visiting Brazilian President Dilma Roussef said the two sides “expressed grave concern” at the current situation in Syria.
“They agreed on the need to continue urging the Syrian authorities to put an end to the violence and to initiate a peaceful transition to democracy.”
The well-informed David Bosco predicts that India and South Africa will also vote for the resolution, although the Indians were fighting a rearguard action against it last week. He thinks that China and, in the end, Russia will abstain. Meanwhile, Turkey is giving the resolution full support from outside the Council:
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan voiced support for the proposed UN resolution and said he would soon announce sanctions on the neighbouring country.
“The draft resolution before the council today is in the nature of sending a warning. We hope there will a positive outcome of this vote and that there will then be further discussions about whatever further steps need to be taken,” Erdogan told a news conference during a visit to South Africa.
The political picture could change again before the vote, and it can’t be repeated too often that the EU’s resolution has been watered down a lot , with a threat of sanctions reduced to near-invisibility. But I think that this episode underlines the point Franziska Brantner and I made in our recent update on human rights and the UN for ECFR: many non-Western powers, especially rising powers like Brazil, want to distance themselves from Russia’s obstructionism in UN debates. Even China is ready to step away from the Russians, as it did over Côte d’Ivoire. As we noted in our paper, and I repeated here last week, this opens up the EU’s options for coalition-building in New York. It looks like the EU is finally finding ways to use those options…
by Richard Gowan | Oct 4, 2011 | Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, East Asia and Pacific, Europe and Central Asia, Global system, North America
It’s obvious that the Asia-Pacific will dominate American strategic thought for the foreseeable future. Today an Obama administration official confirmed just that:
The Obama administration is “rebalancing” U.S. foreign policy by enacting a “turn to Asia,” a senior State Department official said Tuesday. “As the long shadow of 9/11 recedes, we are witnessing the re-emergence of the Asia-Pacific as a key theater of global politics and economics,” Kurt Campbell, assistant secretary of State, told a House panel.
What does this mean for America’s NATO allies? This is a topic I addressed briefly in an op-ed for the EU Institute for Security Studies (EUISS), which has launched an enjoyable online debate about transatlantic cooperation:
Since the Iraq war peaked, US strategic debate has increasingly shifted away from counter-insurgency and stabilisation operations to securing the Asia-Pacific. This has involved diplomatic outreach to India and South-East Asia and a military focus on China’s growing capabilities and its threat to US vessels in the western Pacific.
The European security debate is also evolving, but it is driven by financial concerns. While China’s rise will frame American security policy for years ahead – even in the event of a major terrorist attack – no comparable challenge shapes European worldviews. Russia’s uneven resurgence worries many EU and NATO members, but Moscow’s ambitions centre on energy deals and it does not present a true strategic game-changer. Instead, the need for austerity dominates European thinking.
Do European military forces have any role to play in Asian-Pacific affairs? In another contribution to the EUISS debate, Daniel Keohane argues that Europe won’t look far beyond its periphery, and he doesn’t find this surprising:
Put simply, the US is an Asian power, but the Europeans are not. This is not new. During the Cold war, France and Britain carried out a military operation in the Suez Canal, but they did not join the Americans in Vietnam.
Indeed, future historians may conclude that Afghanistan was the exception that proved this post-World War II rule. Most Europeans went to Afghanistan for the sake of their close relationship with the United States, not because it was an existential threat to their security. That unhappy experience makes it very unlikely that Europeans would follow Americans on future military operations beyond Europe’s neighbourhood.
Richard Gowan, therefore, is right about the emerging strategic divergence between Europeans and Americans. But for Europeans the issue is not so much that the Pentagon cares more about Asia; it is that Washington cares much less about Europe.
There are lots of other contributions to the EUISS debate, and they’re all worth a look. But most of them don’t really address the problem of Europe’s (ir)relevance in the Pacific theater. Quite a few contributors are still focused on the need for better Euro-American cooperation in the European theater instead, and all (including Daniel and me) recognize that financial concerns will affect both European and American security policy very deeply. Nonetheless, I wonder whether the European Security community – and U.S. commentators focused on Europe – have really grappled with the implications of a shift from an Atlantic-centered to a post-Atlantic security order…
by Andy Sumner | Oct 2, 2011 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Economics and development, Global system
I just finished a fantastic and provocative book – a wake up call to the aid and development ‘industry’ (of which I am a part so good to be woken up once in a while)…
The book is ‘Delivering Development ’ by rising star of the blogosphere Edward Carr (see his blog Open the Echo Chamber and good posts on all sorts of stuff). He’s part of what seems to be a growing group of people who have academic backgrounds, blogs and work in policy or what Nora Lustig calls the ‘scholar-practitioner’. In fact he is currently on secondment to USAID from University of South Carolina, working on issues at the intersection of development and climate change.
Ed has an interesting background. He went to Ghana to do an archeological dig, became more interested in events in the present, and ended up a social scientist mashup of geographer/anthropologist/aid and development policy wonk, focused on understanding how the global poor manage economic, environmental and other challenges in their everyday lives.
Given Ed’s book draws on his work in Ghana, it illustrates many of the contradictions of globalization that were in various headlines last week in the business press on Ghana’s incredible oil boom. The size of the Ghanaian economy grew by a third in just one year and there’s been a massive expansion of mobile communications in a country where average incomes are still only about $3/day per person (exchange rate conversion) and 1 in 5 live under the poverty line of $2/day (PPP$s) (see data here and there’s a reasonable but mixed picture on the UN poverty goals in Ghana – see here).
(more…)
