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I’ve had a go at explaining why here:
http://www.freethink.org/index.php/freethinkers/5-freethinkers/423-leftwing-imperialism

But have a bit of common sense: can an economy capable of building that many sky scrapers, that many airports, really be at half the level of Victorian Britain’s productivity? No – when you get a weird result, check your workings!

You’re not. Someone else didn’t read the Ladybird book of economics.

Praguetory. BA Hons Economics 2:1 Nottingham

The problem is the inefficiency inherent in using a never ending supply of taxpayers money in a project, which means that you very rarely have cost pressures on your production line to encourage efficiency (no government is going to pull the plug on an overbudget project because they’ll have spent taxpayers money on absolutely nothing). In a monopoly this might work, but in a free market system the government cannot compete with private companies because of the lack of pressures that force efficiencies.

So yes, the government theoretically could make a profit (there’s nothing to stop them making and selling goods) but they will always struggle to match the quality and value of a private company simply because they don’t have the worries of failure/bankruptcy pushing them to match efficiency.

If people have the following:-
Enough clean water , close at hand and easily deliverable
Clean sanitation systems
Produce food in excess so they can sell it in a fair trade system
Efficient ovens to minimise wood collection
Grow trees which can often survive in droughts better than ususual crops and provide wood
Irrigation systems which they can repair and afford to run- no diesel generators
Basic medical care
Pesticide covered mosquito nets
Help to improve yields of crops (using copost ,not expensive fertilisers and minimising use of pesticides).
Be provided with a cow or goats to increase income

If the the above are covered then people will have the good health which will greatly reduce mortality from disease and afford to pay for education. Most of the above basic development issues are covered by Practical Action, Water aid and Forest Aid. They know what they are doing , why pay for civil servants in Whitehall ?

Where these vouchers are introduced there will simply be an increase in internal NGO bureaucracy to process the collection of funding, an increase in the marketing budget to the detriment of real work and a duplication of capacity as various agencies overreach themselves. In short, vouchers are a disaster waiting to happen.

What a load of inaccurate, conjectural bollocks. Let me guess, you haven’t read the book or any of the papers by James Tooley and colleagues which the report cites, where he demonstrates how private schools serving the poor in developing nations are ubiquitous, cheap, and get better results than state schools. No, instead of a reasoned examination of the evidence, your arguments don’t even bother to attack the actual view in the paper! If you actually bothered to read it, you might see that instead of arguing for vouchers which can be redeemed via NGOs (as you mistakenly claim), the report says: “the vouchers would be redeemable for development services of any kind with a supplier of their choice. Such an innovation would help demonstrate what poor people really want – and who they perceive to be most effective in meeting their needs.” I’m not sure which part of that you don’t understand, to be honest.

I’m under no illusions that the Tory policies are perfect, but the only ‘gimmick’ here is your lazy and/or dishonest attempt at criticism.

Tax havens facilitate mass capital flight from developing nations. Capital flight is the number 1 reason developing nations cannot develop, seconded by corruption (which tax havens facilitate) and a lack of domestically-accessible tax revenue (ditto).

But not only does the UK allow Jersey, Guernsey, the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands, the Turks and Caicos Islands, the Isle of Man (etc etc etc) to go on operating as tax havens, it actually subsidises several of them. And further more, it directs its state-owned private equity fund – CDC – to use tax havens when “investing” in poor nations.

What I want to know is: what is the Tory policy on tax havens as part of its policy for international development?

Oh, there isn’t one. Because the Torries’ mates and donors have a vested interest in keeping the offshore financial world unregulated and unaccountable.

“Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day – give him a net and show him how to use it and he will eat for a lifetime”.

That can be transferred into international aid – simplistic, but still, the most simple of ideas are usually the best.

As for the Indian and Chinese “problem” – while aid should not be stopped over night, surely as they are minted they can start to direct funds toward the poor in their own nations. If they should need help then we should offer it willingly.

For the betterment of the poor in, say, African nations, just as an example – feet on the ground would be a better proposition in helping people discover water, how to grow food stuffs in the heat etc rather than just sending over coin to be put in a bank account in Switzerland on behest of some tinpot dictator.

A whole policy paper, and no mention of the one group of people to whom aid should be accountable to:

The poor.

well USAID is much bigger than DfID in absolute terms, and does a lot more than the nutty stuff but I take your point – I was just trying to point out that DfID is already regarded as one of the best development agencies there is, up there with the sainted Nordics.

Not saying much, really. Doesn’t the US spend c. 0.3% of GDP on foreign aid? And under Bush, weren’t huge chunks of that dedicated to ideologically nutty projects like teaching abstention-only policies in nations ravaged by aids, whilst banning the distribution of condoms?

I’m glad DFID is rated way above USAID. Can you imagine how bad it would have to be to not rate more highly?

Hmmm. Works in Opera. Missing in FF 3.0.13.

b.t.w. foreign aid, when not consisting of advice etc., essentially boils down to giving a country a foreign currency – i.e. giving it dollars. China has $2 trillion of reserves. Your points about the huge numbers of desperately poor people in China are well taken (it is often overlooked) but that still doesn’t mean allocating aid to China is best use of scare resources.

I’m off to Thailand now, so I probably won’t be responding to any comments for a while, but I’ll be back in two weeks when I’ll be happy to tackle anything which is thrown up.

On the point about capitalism being a gift to the world, I think that the real issue is that actually the problem is poor countries have not established capitalism. Capitalism is more about creating a particular property rights structure than free markets, and developing countries have failed to establish a productive capitalist class capable of driving growth. To do this often requires massive property rights transfers to the productive classes as in South Korea etc., which is the opposite of stable property rights. It’s about protecting the property rights of capitalists, and withdrawing them if you’re not productive.

Aid to India? A country with its own space program?

Aid programmes take resources from poor people in rich countries and spend them on rich people in poor countries. You all know the quote, of course!

Aid to Cambodia? Have you SEEN the new villas shooting up there, in PP and in Sihanoukville?

This whole con-job of aiding despots is vile and disgusting.

However, directly aiding suffering people like land-mine victims and people like lepers is commendable in its own right, even if it does no real good in the long run other than making sure the donors get a condo in Heaven, if there is a Heaven.

I was driving up to the Jebel Akhdar Hotel in Oman and had to slow on a long curve; an amazing sight met my eyes so I stopped and got out.

There were some Gap year kiddies – Jeremy, Nigel and Fiona and Samantha, all Public-School Brits – building a crude shelter so that the locals could sit beneath it and sell their honey and crude handicrafts. As they toiled in the noon heat, the locals squatted and watched them doing work done in the old days by slaves – and done these days by Hindis paid a pittance – with silent incredulity.

The truly bizarre thing was that these Gap Year kiddies really and truly thought they were doing something worthwhile and commendable.

@Praguetory Thank you, it’s a tough topic and there’s a lot to cover but I hope I’ve made some half decent points. I don’t really consider these particularly left wing criticisms. More Bismark than Marx

What I was referring to is different. I am talking particularly about a failure to address conflict (e.g. Zimbabwe, Rwanda) and corruption (many locations) which can be explained by a reticence caused by our colonial past, but is in fact inexcusable moral cowardice and deeply damaging.

By the way, Left Outside, I thought yours was a good article and I am very happy to see these policy issues being discussed.