> http://www.thenewrepublic.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020729&s=easterbrook072902
> THE CASE FOR FOREIGN AID.
> by Gregg Easterbrook
>
> Ideologically charged debates often center around whether aid or trade
> conquers poverty. But in countries that have followed the "Tiger"
> model of export growth--Indonesia, Bolivia, Ghana, Vietnam, Chile,
> Botswana--foreign aid has often buttressed market-oriented development
> strategies. Indeed, foreign aid is one of the levers donors have used
> in recent years to push developing-world governments to liberalize
> their economies. Donors, for instance, have helped Vietnam start a
> thriving coffee-export trade; Chad is on the verge of tapping its
> petroleum reserves via an oil pipeline built with World Bank support.
Easterbrook doesn't know jack about the global economy. Indonesia is still a mess, with no indigenous industrial base of its own, Bolivia is poor as dirt, while Vietnam has broken every law in the neoliberal book to industrialize (it even has a Japanese-style postal savings system). And his charge that Western Europe is spreading socialism is a crock -- the FRG loaned the GDR billions, sure -- and then repo'd the entire goddamn country when it couldn't repay.
Easterbrook apparently doesn't realize that the 3rd world has 2 trillion EUR of hard currency debt sitting on its neck, and that the flow of capital isn't metropole --> periphery but the other way around. The interest payments on that debt are a crime against humanity, period.
-- Dennis