Humanitarian Invasion is the first book of its kind: a ground-level inside account of what development and humanitarianism meant for Afghanistan, a country touched by international aid like no other. ...Relying on Soviet, Western, and NGO archives, interviews with Soviet advisers and NGO workers, and Afghan sources, Timothy Nunan forges a vivid account of the impact of development on a country on the front lines of the Cold War. Nunan argues that Afghanistan functioned as a laboratory for the future of the Third World nation-state. If, in the 1960s, Soviets, Americans, and Germans sought to make a territorial national economy for Afghanistan, later, under military occupation, Soviet nation-builders, French and Swedish humanitarians, and Pakistani-supported guerrillas fought a transnational civil war over Afghan statehood. Covering the entire period from the Cold War to Taliban rule, Humanitarian Invasion signals the beginning of a new stage in the writing of international history.
Contrary to the popular view that the U.S. welfare system has been in a contractionary phase after the expansions of the welfare state in the 1960s, welfare spending resumed steady growth after a ...pause in the 1970s. However, although aggregate spending is higher than ever, there have been redistributions away from non-elderly and nondisabled families to families with older adults and to families with recipients of disability programs; from non-elderly, nondisabled single-parent families to married-parent families; and from the poorest families to those with higher incomes. These redistributions likely reflect longstanding, and perhaps increasing, conceptualizations by U.S. society of which poor are deserving and which are not.
We investigate whether foreign aid from China is prone to political capture in aid-receiving countries. Specifically, we examine whether more Chinese aid is allocated to the birth regions of ...political leaders, controlling for indicators of need and various fixed effects. We collect data on 117 African leaders' birthplaces and geocode 1650 Chinese development projects across 2969 physical locations in Africa from 2000 to 2012. Our econometric results show that political leaders' birth regions receive substantially larger financial flows from China in the years when they hold power compared to what the same region receives at other times. We find evidence that these biases are a consequence of electoral competition: Chinese aid disproportionately benefits politically privileged regions in country-years when incumbents face upcoming elections and when electoral competitiveness is high. We observe no such pattern of favoritism in the spatial distribution of World Bank development projects.
•We study the subnational allocation of Chinese aid in Africa.•We combine information of leaders' birthplaces with geocoded Chinese aid data.•Political leaders' birth regions receive more Chinese aid.•Effects are stronger before executive elections and when elections are competitive.•We find no birth-region bias in the allocation of World Bank aid.
Much about India's economy and aid flows has changed in the last two decades. India's growth rate has quickened since economic liberalisation, the poverty head count has fallen and the volume and ...composition of its aid have changed as new issues of climate change and the environment have emerged.. Yet Does Aid Work in India?, first published in 1990, remains of great interest as a study of aid effectiveness in India's pre-liberalisation era. It identifies those sectors where aid-funded interventions succeeded, and where they failed. It explains how India avoided problems of aid dependence, and managed the political tensions that are associated with aid policy dialogue. More generally, it contains a useful commentary on and criticism of donors' aid evaluation procedures at that time and it highlights donor efforts in the difficult area of institution building. Despite the passage of time, many of the insights from India's earlier experience remain highly relevant to key issues of development assistance today.
‘Their work is the most comprehensive and up-to-date now available’ – New Statesman and Society
‘Lipton and Toye deploy their considerable expertise on agriculture and the Indian Economy in assessing the effects of aid, including food aid, on growth and equity in the agricultural sector.’ – The Economic Journal
1. India’s Aid Resources in Macroeconomic Context 2. Aid and Poverty in India 3. Policy Dialogue 4. The Systemic Effects of Aid and Donor Procedures 5. Project Aid to India 6. Resource Management, Institution Building, and Technical Assistance 7 . Aid and Market Forces
This paper spells out the vision of the World Bank on how to strenghten worldwide health systems and ensure better responses to key challenges such as combating the HIV/AIDS pandemic, repositioning ...nutrition on the development agenda, and renewing commitment on population policy. This strategy also entails stronger analytical and operational work in these important areas.
The United States is the world's leading foreign aid donor. Yet there has been little inquiry into how such assistance affects the politics and societies of recipient nations. Drawing on four decades ...of data on U.S. economic and military aid, Aiding and Abetting explores whether foreign aid does more harm than good. Jessica Trisko Darden challenges long-standing ideas about aid and its consequences, and highlights key patterns in the relationship between assistance and violence. She persuasively demonstrates that many of the foreign aid policy challenges the U.S. faced in the Cold War era, such as the propping up of dictators friendly to U.S. interests, remain salient today. Historical case studies of Indonesia, El Salvador, and South Korea illustrate how aid can uphold human freedoms or propagate human rights abuses. Aiding and Abetting encourages both advocates and critics of foreign assistance to reconsider its political and social consequences by focusing international aid efforts on the expansion of human freedom.
Against Massacre looks at the rise of humanitarian intervention in the nineteenth century, from the fall of Napoleon to the First World War. Examining the concept from a historical perspective, ...Davide Rodogno explores the understudied cases of European interventions and noninterventions in the Ottoman Empire and brings a new view to this international practice for the contemporary era.
First published in 1987, this reissue explores contemporary United States foreign aid policies and thinking in the Reagan era. The author argues that aid policy is often confused as a result of ...bureaucratic decision-making processes. The book contrasts the experience of the many countries where aid-giving has produced unwished-for effects with the few countries where the desired results have occurred. The author concludes by arguing for a new approach to aid-giving by the United States.
1. The Political Economy of US Foreign Aid: Past and Present 2. Critical Perspectives on Foreign Aid 3. The Bureaucratic Role Conflict Model 4. US Aid to Latin America 5. US Aid to Asia 6. US Aid to the Middle East 7. Conclusion
Poverty is not a neutral phenomenon, nor are social inclusion programmes neutrally conceived, designed and implemented.Their ultimate nature is built upon ideas, values, actors, politics and economic ...constraints.This topical book is one of the first to examine the social and political construction of anti-poverty programmes in Central Eastern Europe and their transformation from communist rule to the current economic crisis. It covers the approach towards the 'parasite' poor through to Guaranteed Minimum Income Schemes and illustrates how the distinction between different categories of 'deserving' and 'undeserving' poor has evolved over the years as the result of changing paradigms, combined with the pressure exerted by domestic and international actors, the European Union and the World Bank among others. This text breaks new ground for social policy students and scholars interested in understanding how differently post-communist welfare states have represented, legitimised and dealt with poverty, need and social justice in accordance with divergent normative frameworks constructed at national level.
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