This appears in Australia’s The Age newspaper:

Australia is the least generous contributor to overseas aid among the G20 countries, costing thousands of lives every year, a report shows.

The report, released as part of the Make Poverty History campaign, involving 60 Australian aid agencies, community groups and church groups, shows that all countries part of the G20, apart from Australia, have increased their overseas aid allocation since 2000.

The report, by Simon Feeny and Matthew Clarke, comes just days before Melbourne hosts the G20 meeting of finance ministers and central bank governors from the world’s largest economies.

I don’t like this sort of argument: the notion that not getting involved with someone is “costing thousands of lives”, because there is an underlying assumption that all of the world’s resources should be given in foreign aid because that is the only economic position where your actions are not “costing thousands of lives”.

In fact, the issue of foreign aid is far more complicated that its religious supporters suggest. Even Christian Aid has come out and said that they don’t think the “big push” approach to foreign aid is the answer. As William Easterly points out, the overwhelming evidence is that development aid does not promote growth. In fact, there is considerable evidence to the contrary, suggesting that aid can undermine democracy and entrench poor governments. David Cameron has called for a “campaign for capitalism” in the developing world, and he’s right: promoting property rights and creating the environments where businesses can flourish are essential for seeing developing countries lift themselves out of poverty.

Unfortunately, there is a political consensus in Britain that somehow the UN target of 0.7% of GDP on aid spending is necessary. Indeed, there is a strong case politically for supporting the target because it ticks a box that “proves” your compassion. Yet it is a measure purely of inputs rather than outputs. Why 0.7% and not 1% or 100%? Because DFID is wedded to the Millennium Development Goals, which means it supports everything from motherhood to apple pie, it is impossible to measure how successful DFID is doing. DFID needs to go beyond the Millennium Development Goals, and specialise in what it really things are important doing. Then maybe we could measure a government’s success on development by what it achieves, not what it inputs.