"Africa's landlocked countries are not oriented toward their neighbors. Both their infrastructure and their policies are oriented either to be completely inward-looking or toward the world market. Neighbors are just in the way of the world market, not themselves the market. And this shows up in the growth spillovers.
In Africa, if the neighbors grow [...] it doesn't spill over. To date it has not mattered very much: usually in Africa the neighbors of the landlocked have barely been growing, so there has been precious little growth to spill over. But as things stand, even if the more fortunate countries started to grow, it would not help the landlocked."
-- "The Bottom Billion' by Paul Collier, p. 57 - 58
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| picture taken from jhr.ca |
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| Taken from Brand Aid |
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| picture taken from ICLB |
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| Taken from Selling Costa Rica |
What if, one by one, African countries each received a phone call, telling them that in exactly five years the aid taps would be shut off - permanently? Although exceptions would be made for isolated emergency relief such as famine and natural disasters, aid would no longer attempt to address Africa's generic economic plight.Would many more millions in Africa die from poverty and hunger? Probably not - the reality is that Africa's poverty-stricken don't see the aid flows anyway. Would there be more wars, more coups, more despots? Doubtful - without aid, you are taking away a big incentive for conflict. Would roads, schools and hospitals cease being built? Unlikely.Isn't it likely that in a world freed of aid, economic life for the majority of Africans might actually improve, that corruption would fall, entrepreneurs would rise, and Africa's growth engine would start chugging?
-- Dambisa Moyo, Dead Aid
[Moyo] ignores the fact that aid was only provided when countries meet requirements that restricted their own economy. Systematically pruning the government spending, privatizing and unmonitored opening of their markets for producers where developing countries bcan't compete with, one of the major causes for the current problems of Africa.
[...] When you want to address poverty, working on these root causes are the main assignment. If you don't do that, all the aid in the world won't have any effect on the development, but that doesn't mean that aid in itself would be useless.
[...] Aid alone is not sufficient to solve Africa's problems. Aid is a catalyst which can enstrengthen the development. That can only happen when the right climate is present, both internal as external.
Bogdan Vanden Berghe from the Flemish umbrella organisation '11 11 11' in "Don't blame aid" (article written in Dutch)
Her alternative (more free market, more trade with Asia than with Europe and the USA, more capitalism) is not very credible. But her analysis gets down to brass tacks. Every road constructed in Africa by the World Bank (or China), every hospital being furnished or every school built with foreign money, dismisses the local potentates of their responsibilities to do it themselves and therefore maintains the corruption.
Walter Zinzen, Belgian journalist: "Stop development aid" in De Standaard (article written in Dutch)
[...] we should question the quality of "growth", because basically we have a growth model that does not work for the majority of the people in the world. What we have in the world today is called "jobless growth" and "growth without equity".
In fact the growth that we have, particularly since the fall of the Berlin wall, when we have a surge of neoliberalism, we have seen actually virtually in every single country in the world the gap between rich and poor growing at an astronomical rate, and also the gap between rich and poor countries growing quite fundamentally. So when we talk about redifining development, we have to basically say that there are no holy cows and in that case, in that sense I think that Moyo her book is helpful as it makes a provocative statement.
While I disagree with the conclusion of it, some of the observations are obviously helpful.
Kumi Naidoo, South African human rights activist: debate with Dembisa Moyo
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| Cover of the book by Yash Tandon |
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| Taken from Femke Van Zeijl |
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| Taken from the World Bank |
The [African Development Bank] says members of the middle classes are having fewer children, are better educated and more geographically concentrated in urban areas or along the coasts.
[...] while there were several reasons behind the growth of the middle classes, education has been the main catalyst.
Good governance has also played an important role, because it allows businesses to flourish and wealth accumulation to take place.
[Do not migrate, the] amount of money needed to leave for Europe would get you a nice little business here [in Africa].
The bank warns, however, that 60% of those defined as middle class - those spending between $2 and $4 a day - are vulnerable to economic or political shocks, and could easily fall back below the poverty line. Only about 123 million Africans - those who are spending between $4 and $20 a day - are therefore considered economically stable by the bank.
-- BBC
