Argumentative Essay On Foreign Aid

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Recommended: Advantages and disadvantages of foreign aid

Introduction

This essay will argue that the current British policy of trying to meet the target of spending 0.7% of British Gross National Income on foreign aid is flawed. It will be split into three sections: the first will establish that foreign aid is an important and contentious area of policy, the second will show the problems of the 0.7% target whilst the final one will propose solutions to the problems inherent in current policy choices in the area. The main conclusion of the essay will be that, if the United Kingdom is committed to delivering effective foreign aid, it ought to stop considering whether it has spent enough on developing countries but instead focus on whether its expenditure is having effect. Throughout, discussion will be made harder by the fact that current academic commentary on foreign aid ‘anarchy’. Considering this, the essay will try to illustrate as broad a range as possible in the various approaches taken to the topic, before reaching its overall conclusion.

Section A: The Importance of Foreign Aid

Foreign aid policy has been selected as the topic for this essay as it is an important topic that has impact on British politics in the international and domestic sphere. An example of the contentiousness of the area is the fact that a petition to divert foreign aid back to British flood relief managed to gain two hundred and thirty thousand people within a manner of days. Such a petition would not be significant if it was not backed up by evidence of overall British opinion on foreign aid but the fact that this is a divisive issue is illustrated in a selection of polls. The Department for International Development (DfID hereafter), for example, found in an independent and weighted poll conducted i...

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...ut a set of goals that includes a quantitative element. This will return the 0.7% figure to what it was originally intended to be, a figure to make countries donate more to aid, as opposed to an almost venerated figure. This essay therefore concludes that the UK, if it wants to further its aims of both international recognition for its foreign aid alongside granting effective aid, needs to adopt a target that consists of three elements instead of one by using a quantitative figure, evidence from developing nations and a figure that represents the targeting of aid.

Peter Nunnenkamp and Rainer Thiele, ‘Financing for Development: The Gap between Words and Deeds since Monterrey’ (2013) 31(1) Dev Policy Rev 75, 76.

United Nations, ‘Monterrey Consensus of the International Conferenceon Financing for Development’ (United Nations Department of Public Information 2003) 7

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