A huge conspiracy which has surrounded the thinking and research of many economic specialists is whether foreign aid is actually helping third world countries is mass poverty or whether is it just trying to modernise them to quickly and the fact that government organisations may actually be harming rather than helping. I feltlike this linked into my personal investigation because i am going on a small non government organised trip and i will be able to see the impact that the work that is being done through this charitable work is making slow progress to the community and reducing illiterate rates and decreasing poverty. However it has been argued by the newest winner of the nobel prize in economics that big foreign aid organisations may be having the reverse effects to what small selfless charities are doing. Angus Denton is an economist at Princeton university and has studied poverty in both Indian and south america. His ideas about foreign aid are particularly provocative as he argues that “by trying to help poor people in developing countries, the rich world may actually be corrupting those nations’ governments and slowing their growth.” 

It is understandable that this view has caused mass debate and a lot of upst due to the amount people give to charity and yes it can be argued truthfully that aid organisations have a massively positive impact on the poverty and disease which is causing monstrous death rates in third world countries and have decreased the amount of poverty and death rates due to starvation has decreased aver the last couple of decades. This has been through organisations set up and run by the government installing fresh water, providing vaccinations and in some areas a place to live. However i am interested in Deatons argument as it is a revisionist view and has become increasingly studied. Although he wasnt the first to  economist to challenge assumptions that foreign aid helped, over the past two decades his arguments began to receive great amounts of attention because he was finding secure evidence for his reasoning. Deaton’s skepticism about the benefits of foreign aid grew out of his research, which involved looking in detail at households in the developing world, where he could see the effects of foreign aid intervention.

“I think his understanding of how the world worked at the micro level made him extremely suspicious of these get-rich-quick schemes that some people peddled at the development level,” – Daron Acemoglu

The first lot of evidence for his and others research was the fact that altho the level of foreign aid in africa soared in the 80’s and 90’s the african economies were actually doing worse which isnt what youd expect to see. Economic growth has not been being produced through these aid organisations. A correlation has been made between the increasing rate of foreign aid coming into a country with a lower economic growth. therefore this leads to the question of why this is occurring ad why aid organisation may lead to negative impacts to countries instead of what they are intended to do which is help. Researchers came to a conclusion of why this reverse effect may be occurring; so the idea is that in order to have the funding to run a country, this specific country needs to be collecting taxes from its population. As the people hold the ropes they in some sense have a certain amount of control over the government through the way that if the government dont provide people with the certain services they promise then the people can cut them off/ not give taxes. Deatons main arguement against foreign aid is that it weakens this relationship betweeen the people and government.

“My critique of aid has been more to do with countries where they get an enormous amount of aid relative to everything else that goes on in that country,” Deaton said in an interview with Wonkblog. “For instance, most governments depend on their people for taxes in order to run themselves and provide services to their people. Governments that get all their money from aid don’t have that at all, and I think of that as very corrosive.”

Therefore the genral idea is that if the people are getting the services they require, such as food, clear water, medication, health care and housing from foreign aid they arent going to be paying taxation to the government who weren’t able to provide them with these services. this weakens the relationship and furthermore the economy, leaving these third world countries in a worsened economic state than they originally were. Moreover other arguements have began to appear about the fact that big foreign aid organisations are also modernising third world countries to the point that when the aid leaves them the countries cannot keep up with the moderness as they dont have the resources or funding and are not accomodated to this new modern way of life. This can be seen as distrupting local communities way of life. For example, a foreign aid organisation may visit and poverty stricken area in Africa, provide the children with vaccinations and medication, but what happens when these run out, they don’t have the resources, knowledge or technology to remake medication. Therefore although it is seeming that in promotional adverts these organisations are helping they are giving them the final outcome rather than building communities up to be able to cater for themselves and be independent without further requiring on these charities.

This leads me onto the difference between government organisations and non government organisations. I believe that the area which i am going to, Bobo, has been transformed in a positive way which hasn’t worsened the economy. The money that is raised goes towards the compassion project which educates the communities children and provides them with cooking skills and basic health and hygiene lessons which allows them to reduce the chances of disease. The Burkina Faso freedom project which i am taking part in also aims at building up the community at a low level with basic classrooms, medical centers and toilet blocks which aim to improve their way of life in a slow manor which they can kept up with and will continue to grow at a rate which is right for them.