An article from last May 3 in The Economist called: "Gauging Generosity" offers a discussion of measures of "giving" and tries to answer the question: "Which rich countries do most to help poor countries?"
The Center for Global Development, a Washington think-tank, with Foreign Policy magazine rates 21 rich countries used these measures of help:
* aid, * trade, * the environment, * migration, * investment, and * peacekeeping.
The Economist paper is here: http://www.cgdev.org/rankingtherich/EconomicsfocusCDI.pdf
For the full perspective, You should look at the table in the above paper to see a numbered rating for each of the six categories, here, however is the average calculated for the six categories:
Netherlands 5.6 Denmark 5.5 Portugal 5.2 New Zealand 5.1 Switzerland 5.0 Germany 4.7 Spain 4.7 Sweden 4.5 Austria 4.4 Norway 4.3 Britain 4.2 Belgium 4.0 Greece 3.9 France 3.8 Ireland 3.6 Italy 3.6 Finland 3.5 Canada 3.4 Australia 3.2 U.S. 2.6 Japan 2.4
It's an interesting evaluation. Norway is a generous aid donor, but it has protectionist trade policies. America scores very well on trade, but gives only 0.12% of its GDP in aid and scores poorly in the other categories as well. Portugal is very high in investment (it is a big investor in Latin America). New Zealand, Switzerland, and Germany are extremely high in migration. Switzerland's migration policy (the number of legal migrants it accepts relative to its population) was surprising because it is not usually thought to be open to foreigners. From my experience so far in Germany and Italy, I can say the migration numbers for Germany and Italy seem about right (Germany: 8.1 and Italy 1.1).
Of the aid and trade measures, the CGD has a sophisticated rating system that adjusts foreign aid to the country's GDP, and the quality of the aid. Of the quality of the aid, for example, it deducts administrative costs, and it strips out principal and interest repayments made by poor countries (because a lot of the "aid" is in fact low-interest loans, not gifts).
The environmental index tries to capture how much rich countries deplete global environmental resources, for example by measuring greenhouse-gas emission per head. It also looks at their contributions to clean technology and commitment to environmental treaties. U.S. came out at the bottom, but The Economist points out that it didn't consider investment in pharmaceutical or agricultural research, where the U.S.'s contribution is significant.
The CGD index is a crude first stab at measuring the rich world's help for the poor and the authors themselves admit that it has many flaws, but it is a good first step that emphasizes that aid alone is a misleading guide; trade and peace matter at least as much.
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******************************************************************** Amara Graps, PhD email: amara at amara.com Computational Physics vita: ftp://ftp.amara.com/pub/resume.txt Multiplex Answers URL: http://www.amara.com/ ******************************************************************** "Every exit is an entry somewhere else." --Tom Stoppard
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