McLeod Group Blog, June 24, 2015
If you’re in favour of foreign aid, there is good news: Development aid from the world’s industrialized countries remained steady at US$135.2 billion in 2014, after an all-time high in 2013.
If you think aid should go to the poorest countries, however, there is bad news: They only got 28% of the total, a drop of 16% in a single year.
Among OECD member countries, the ten least generous—all at less than 0.2% of gross national income—were, in descending order: Portugal, Japan, the United States (yes, that United States), Italy, Spain, Slovenia, Korea, Greece, the Czech Republic and, at the bottom, Poland. The most generous, at 1.1%, was Sweden.
Denmark, Luxembourg, Norway and Britain all made the UN target of 0.7%, and there were major increases in Germany, Sweden and Finland.
Finland? Oh, sorry. The new centre-right Finnish government announced this month that it would slash the aid budget by 43%. Australia, just a whisker above the cheapest of the cheapskates at 0.24%, has announced that it will chop A$1 billion off next year’s aid budget. That represents about 20%, dropping Australia into the pit with Portugal and the other pikers.
In 2014, Canadian aid fell by almost 11% to a low of 0.24%, worse than New Zealand and a lot worse than Ireland. With further cuts already under way in 2015, we’ll soon be close to the bottom of the class.
Canada’s Minister for International Development, Christian Paradis, rarely discusses the aid budget, the cuts he presides over or the additional hundreds of millions he is prone to lapsing. Instead, he speaks of remittances sent home by diaspora communities as though these somehow vaccinate children. He takes pride in a $300 million ‘development finance initiative’ for Canadian companies operating in ‘low- and middle-income countries’, as though this will somehow train teachers. ‘Let me by crystal clear,’ he says, without any clarity at all, ‘the central mandate of the DFI will be global poverty reduction.’
Paradis is especially proud of taking the lead in something called the ‘global finance exchange’ that will be unveiled at a Financing for Development Conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in July. He calls it ‘an online marketplace, a knowledge broker, an accelerator of innovative blended finance models.’
‘I like to compare this to a dating site,’ he explains. It sounds like going on a date with a second-year economics student who won’t pay for the beer. It sounds, in fact, like a date from hell.
‘An accelerator of innovative blended finance models’ may not be as bad as it sounds, but it would be a lot more credible if it came from a country that didn’t run for the washroom every time the bill arrives.