From the article:
A vaccine campaign and a donor-financed highway in a weak-governance setting are both "aid." But intellectually, they have about as much in common as aspirin and open-heart surgery have in common because they're both "medicine." Nearly every bad argument in the aid debate exploits this ambiguity.
Aid is weakly evidenced and highly contested as a general engine of national economic growth. Aid is strongly evidenced in several domains as a way to produce very large improvements in concrete human outcomes, especially global health and direct cash transfers. Institutions, governance, and political incentives are not side issues; they are often the main story, especially for infrastructure, budget support, and state-building. RCTs improved the field immensely but did not solve external validity or scaling. So the intellectually serious question is not "aid: good or bad?" but which aid, for what, through whom, under what conditions, and compared with what alternative use of money?
The Marshall Plan is often invoked as proof that aid works, but postwar Western Europe had intact institutions, educated populations, functioning legal systems, and destroyed physical capital. Rebuilding factories when you already have engineers, courts, and property rights is a very different problem from building state capacity from scratch. The Marshall Plan's real lesson is more specific: aid works well when the binding constraint is capital rather than institutions.
If you care about helping poor people, and I think you probably do if you've read this far, the evidence says the following: fund vaccines, fund bed nets, fund deworming where prevalence is high, fund cash transfers to very poor households, and be deeply skeptical of large-scale infrastructure and governance-reform programs in settings where the institutions meant to implement them are themselves the problem. Hold donors accountable for results, not for spending targets. And never, ever treat "aid" as though it were one thing.
The world spends over $200 billion on aid per year. Some of it saves lives that would otherwise have been lost. Some of it is wasted. Some of it actively causes harm. The challenge is not to decide whether aid is "worth it" in the abstract. The challenge is to do more of what works, less of what doesn't, and to have the intellectual honesty to defend the difference.
Posted by lakmidaise12