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Why is not effective for rich countries to give money to the poor countries to help them with developing ?
Economics is not my strong side. I don't even know if what I wrote is true. I've heard that from economics point of view it is not a good way to go, that if you simply give like 100 million dollars to some poor country in Africa it won't help them very much. I would like if it is true and why? Thanks.
3 Answers
- SiennaLv 78 years agoFavorite Answer
In economics, it's always important to be clear to identify *who* is the actual person or group of people we are talking about. Many of the errors of economics come from people talking about decision-making entities that are abstract aggregate concepts that do not actually exist in reality.
For example, a "country" is not really a decision-making entity. It refers to three different things at the same time:
a) a physical territory
b) all the people who live there
c) the State - i.e. the group claiming a legal monopoly of the use of force over the people living in that territory.
Economic development comes about because of the activities of people who work and save and invest and undertake business ventures. The purpose is to satisfy human wants by recombining the factors of production - such as land, labour and capital - to produce final products that satisfy human wants better than the uncombined factors of production did.
But when we talk about rich "countries" giving money to poor, we are talking about *States* taking money by force or threats from their subject population (that's what taxation is) and giving it to the people controlling another *State*.
Once we understand that, we can immediately see why development aid has been such an expensive failure everywhere it's been tried. Africa for example has received hundreds of billions of dollars worth of aid in the last half-century, and is commonly considered a development fail, if not a human rights disaster.
Foreign aid, i.e. political foreign aid, is intrinsically corrupt. It involves a privileged elite using force and threats to steal labour and product from the productive class in one country, and giving it to a privileged parasitic class in another country who have no interest in productive activity, since they live by forced expropriations from their subject population. They have only an interest in consuming the donation in a way that best suits their own personal and political interests.
In other words, political donations provide no way to *align* the money donated, with the satisfaction of the wants of the ordinary people, which is its ostensible purpose.
The only way this can be done is by voluntary donations or investments, in businesses whose products are produced and distributed by voluntary means. This rules out political schemes, and leaves only charitable donations and market investments as the only good ways to go, in theory, let alone before we turn to the problems in practice.
Source(s): "Man, Economy and State" by Murray Rothbard available free online - megLv 78 years ago
It is not true if the aid is given wisely but keep in mind that 100million is not very much money when spread out over a whole country. We have people who earn more than that in a year. even a small about of aid to a community can improve the health of people by providing them with clean water, and healthy people work harder and if their children have lower mortality rates they have fewer children. However much of the aid our government gives is the wrong kind, it was to bribe leaders to do what we want and either put in foreign accounts or spent on the military but private charities have done much better.
- Sipra MLv 68 years ago
Just giving money will not help.
* You need to see money given is used for productive purpose.