I’ve been curious about foreign aid for a while, but never delved into researching it. I would be curious to follow more posts or a newsletter on it . Some questions off the top of my head:
how effective (i.e. $ per DALY/QALY) is x country’s aid budget in y year, how does this compare to givewells best interventions?
what does the talent pipeline look like for foreign aid, who works in these departments/orgs?
what underline assumptions or biases influence foreign aid?
case studies of projects done well. Case studies of projects done poorly.
Also, curious if you have any book recommendations?
Government aid projects almost never consider impact the way effective altruists do in terms of DALYs, and so comparing interventions is very very difficult.
One of the biggest problems is that most aid is “Government to government” aid, and so either gets eaten by corruption or is pumped into extremely inefficient government programs. An example of better aid might be money given to the Global vaccine alliance (GAVI) to fund vaccination programs.
A book I really like (although a bit old) is “Dead Aid” by Dambisa Moyo a Zambian born economist who worked for the world bank. She argues that government to government aid does more harm than good, which I agree with. I don’t agree with everything in the book but it gives a good overview of aid and the problems with it.
Agree that govt aid projects don’t consider impact in the same way.
Dambisa Moyo (who worked for the World Bank for 2 years—before going to Goldman Sachs) is one view on how aid effectiveness… but I think it’s fair to say the consensus is that govt ownership is generally seen as a GOOD thing in aid effectiveness literature.
I’ve been curious about foreign aid for a while, but never delved into researching it. I would be curious to follow more posts or a newsletter on it . Some questions off the top of my head:
how effective (i.e. $ per DALY/QALY) is x country’s aid budget in y year, how does this compare to givewells best interventions?
what does the talent pipeline look like for foreign aid, who works in these departments/orgs?
what underline assumptions or biases influence foreign aid?
case studies of projects done well. Case studies of projects done poorly.
Also, curious if you have any book recommendations?
Hey Elliot nice one!
Government aid projects almost never consider impact the way effective altruists do in terms of DALYs, and so comparing interventions is very very difficult.
One of the biggest problems is that most aid is “Government to government” aid, and so either gets eaten by corruption or is pumped into extremely inefficient government programs. An example of better aid might be money given to the Global vaccine alliance (GAVI) to fund vaccination programs.
A book I really like (although a bit old) is “Dead Aid” by Dambisa Moyo a Zambian born economist who worked for the world bank. She argues that government to government aid does more harm than good, which I agree with. I don’t agree with everything in the book but it gives a good overview of aid and the problems with it.
Agree that govt aid projects don’t consider impact in the same way.
Dambisa Moyo (who worked for the World Bank for 2 years—before going to Goldman Sachs) is one view on how aid effectiveness… but I think it’s fair to say the consensus is that govt ownership is generally seen as a GOOD thing in aid effectiveness literature.
https://www.cgdev.org/blog/how-much-foreign-aid-reaches-foreign-governments