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By Jagdish Bhagwati
Excerpted from Foreign Affairs
Moyo’s sense of outrage derives partly from her distress over how rock stars, such as Bono, have dominated the public discussion of aid and development in recent years, to the exclusion of Africans with experience and expertise. “Scarcely does one see Africa’s (elected) officials or those African policymakers charged with a country’s development portfolio offer an opinion on what should be done,” she writes, “or what might actually work to save the continent from its regression…”
Moyo is less convincing, however, when she tries to argue that aid itself has been the crucial factor holding Africa back, and she verges on deliberate provocation when she proposes terminating all aid within five years — a proposal that is both impractical (given existing long-term commitments) and unhelpful (since an abrupt withdrawal of aid would leave chaos in its wake). Click here to keep reading…
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Jagdish Bhagwati is University Professor at Columbia University and Senior Fellow in International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations.