Aid Watch: When Will There Be Good News? Does it Help There Already Was Some? William Easterly
Amid the general doom and gloom, fears about how the crisis will affect poor countries, and fierce criticism of markets, states, and aid agencies, perhaps it’s healthy to step back to the big picture and recognize there has already been some very good news. The graph below shows some overall statistics for the developing world:
This graph has a mixture of good news that all of the much-criticized triad of markets, states, and aid can take partial credit for. Markets obviously get at least some credit for reducing global poverty and increasing global average income. States supply public goods like education, water, and health, and there has been progress on all of these. Aid deserves some credit for successes in health, as already stressed in a previous blog post.
One group that doesn’t deserve much credit is “development experts” because there is a terrible crisis of confidence in development economics now, where we all freely confess we don’t know what to advise governments on how to speed up development. …
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