The Aid Debate: Beyond the Liberal/Conservative Divide

Abstract

R works that assess whether development has been well-served, or served at all, by international aid, are overwhelmingly pessimistic in their assessment and in favor of the market as the antidote to international aid (Klees, 2010). Three of the books reviewed by Steve Klees – Easterly (2006), Moyo (2009), and Dichter (2009) – conclude that the market is a more potent mechanism for alleviating poverty and ensuring development than are aid institutions. These writings reflect the normalization of the neoliberal logic that endorses a market solution to all socio-economic issues and argues for private capital to stimulate economic development in the Third World. The underlying assumption is that economic growth and private enterprise will have spillover effects on social life and assure improvements in health and education indices, a sort of lateral version of the “trickle down” of modernization theory. While this assumption is not new and represents classic liberal thinking, the neoliberal logic inserts an additional twist and endorses private entrepreneurship and quasi-market behavior in social sectors of education and health to substitute for state and international aid investments.

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