Saturday, July 25, 2009

Aid dependence and the MDG(Meeting the Millennium Development Goals)

The present focus on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) has reignited the debate on the need for more aid to developing countries to help them meet the MDGs by 2015. However, this has inevitably rekindled the parallel debate as to whether more aid is really the answer. Will extra money simply shore up inefficient governments and feed government corruption? One response to this is to say we must bypass government and make money available directly to NGOs and other organizations. At the same time, others claim that what is needed is not more aid, but a fundamental transformation of international power relationships, especially reform of international trade and finance rules to allow African and other developing countries to sell their goods and services at a fair price.
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4 comments:

  1. MaracatuJuly 25, 2009 at 10:15 AM

    Yes:
    a fundamental transformation of international power relationships, especially reform of international trade and finance rules

    Especially as far as PROPERTY RIGHTS are concerned!

    ReplyDelete
  2. anandJuly 25, 2009 at 12:39 PM

    Shouldn't real relative prices be set by market forces? The challenge of development is how to facilitate innovation or productivity.

    Example, semiconductor equipment revenue and prices have fallen dramatically because rapid technology progress is sharply reducing (Semi CAPEX/Semi Revenue.) Rather than "sell their goods and services at a fair price." the global semi equipment cap space needs to signficantly shrink. The excess people need to be redeployed to other parts of the tech economy. The same is true in developing countries.

    All of us need to be more creative about finding more innovative ways to provide goods and services that others want.

    To put it into an Indian context, increasingly IT wages in Bangalore, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Delhi are approaching US levels. As a result, it is no longer cost competitive to do sweat shop IT in these places. A major trend in India is the outsourcing of low end IT from expensive rich Indian cities to small towns, villages, eastern europe, the middle east, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and China. This trend is inevitable and needs to be encouraged. It isn't "unfair."

    My strong hope is that increasingly technology jobs can be outsourced from increasingly expensive India to Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Palestine and Iraq. God knows that these other countries need it and are willing to work for a lot less than a Bangalore techie.

    ReplyDelete
  3. MaracatuJuly 25, 2009 at 1:53 PM

    read the article

    ReplyDelete
  4. vJuly 25, 2009 at 8:09 PM

    He does not want to read it Mara, it will be a rehash of what I have said. He wants to wave the "market forces" wand, and ignore the fact that other interests impoverish these countries.

    ReplyDelete

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