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Economic growth and sustainable development
Economic growth and sustainable development
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Critical Evaluation of Development Assistance
“Was Development Assistance A Mistake?”
UB#17007960
WordCount: 1506
Introduction
The disbursements of development assistance have been mounting from Global-North to Global South since the 1960s. According to World Bank data, only in 2014, the net outflow reached to $162 billion. The primary aim of the assistances is to maintain macroeconomic stability with a strong emphasis on the balance of payment and alleviation of poverty in the developing countries. Now decades after, both the disbursers and receivers have been evaluating the effectiveness of such concessional allowances. A number of economists and analysts (Lipton and Toye 1990; Cassen 1994) believe
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The way push and pull factors turned it to be ineffective are the sources of the mistake. The development experts know what actions achieve development, and the money and advice the north has provided can achieve development, but they need to consider country particular conditions as ‘Single Administrative Documents’ (SADs) do not fit to successfully derive SAPs. Finally, the development process is not solely the responsibility of the development experts or individual groups and financial institutions (IMF, WB). The development shall be achieved through participatory development approach. To encapsulate this, the burden of the failure, which today it is considered as mistake shall be cleaved proportionately to development experts (for neglecting various other exogenous conditions to the growth), creditors in the north (for recommending similar prescriptions for all debtors), and debtors in the south (for unproductive spending strategies, corruption and lack of accountability).
References
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Cassen, R. (1994) Does aid work?: report to an intergovernmental task force. 2nd edition. Oxford: Clarendon
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(2007) The bottom billion: why the poorest countries are failing and what can be done about it. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Desai, V. and Potter, R. B. (editors) (2014) Companion to Development Studies. Third edition. Abingdon: Routledge.
Easterly, W. (2001) The Lost Decades: Developing Countries' Stagnation in Spite of Policy Reform 1980-1998. Journal of Economic Growth 6 (2), 135-157.
Easterly, W. (2007) Was Development Assistance a Mistake? The American Economic Review 97 (2), 328-332
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The anti-politics machine” by James Ferguson, a political and economic anthropologist, is an analysis on the failure of financial aids by more than 26 countries in Lesotho, a small landlocked nation of 1.8 million population surrounded by South Africa. The author positions two major critics: first, Lesotho is not of great economic or strategic importance, second, the history of development projects in Lesotho indicates that Lesotho cannot stand its economic and political stability through foreign development programs. The author refers to the development agency. He claims that such agencies are persuaded to form standardized improvement packages in order to discharge the money that they have to spend. Therefore, they target developing countries like Lesotho whose profile bears little or no relation to economic and social realities for such development packages.
The neoliberal policies have benefited some people in generating great wealth for them, but controversially, the policies have failed to benefit the people who live in extreme poverty and those people are the most in need for financial support (Makwana, 2006). In the last 2 to 3 decades, the wealth disparity between nations as well as within nations has increased. Currently, one out of every 5 children in the United States is in a state of poverty, continual hunger, insecurity and lack of health care (MIT, 2000). This situation is becoming even more desperate. Between 1960 and 1980, the developing countries’ economic growth was 3.2 percent. Then it dropped significantly to 0.7 percent between 1980 and 2000, and this is the period when neolibe...
"Progress On Poverty, But 1.2 Billion Still Live On The Extremes." America 209.12 (2013): 8. MAS Ultra - School Edition. Web. 13 Nov. 2013.
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In this book Ferguson aims to create an understanding of the workings of the concept of development through the case study of the Thaba-Tseka Development Project. To achieve this he gives detailed accounts of the setting and conditions of the project, as well as emphasize where and how development practitioners went wrong in this particular case.
There has been an assumption that Africans cannot develop thriving or even sustainable economies without outside monetary support. After decades of U.S. foreign aid and aid from other countries, many in the developing nations of Africa have not seen the benefits of this economic assistance. This fact has raised questions about the effectiveness of these efforts to improve the economies of Africa. Many believe that such aid has not only been unsupportive of these economies, but instead has actually stunted economic growth. As a case in point, this paper will focus on the experience of the country of Zambia with regard to its foreign aid programs and will cite findings reported in several academic journals and other university publications.
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Poor countries have been receiving aid from the international community for over a century now. While such aid is supposed to be considered an act of kindness from the donor nations or international bodies, it has led to over dependence among the developing countries. They have adopted the habit of estimating and including international aid in their national budgets to reduce their balance of trade deficits. It is believed that foreign aid is necessary for poor nations in order to break the cycle of poverty that ties their citizens in low productivity zones and so their economy will not be weak. However, some critics view the extension of aid to poor countries as means of keeping the nations in economic slumber so that they can wake up from only by devising ways of furthering self-sustainability. Because of these two schools of thought concerning the topic, debate has arisen on which side is more rational and factual than the other. The non-sustainable nature of international aid, however, leaves the question of what may happen in the event that foreign aid is unavailable for the poor nations. After thorough consideration on the effects of the assistance to poor countries, it is sufficient to state that giving international aid to the poor nations is more disadvantageous than beneficial to the nations. This point is argued through an analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of giving international aid to the poor countries with appropriate examples drawn from various regions of the world to prove the stance.
As one of the biggest problems facing the world today, poverty continues to have significant negative implications for the society. The effects of poverty are extremely severe and far-reaching, so much so that it was one of the top Millennium Development Goals agreed upon at the Millennium Summit of the UN back in 2000 (Hatcher, 2016). To understand the effects that poverty has on the society, one must critically analyze the societies in which poverty is rampant, as well as analyze poverty from the relative perspectives that it presents. The core aim of this paper is to develop a holistic understanding of poverty and elaborate on the diverse ways in which it continues to affect societies across the world.