Making international development assistance work

Australia’s aid program has been in the news lately, with calls for a wider public debate on the role of overseas aid. But public debate is being shaped by starkly contradictory arguments. An educated layperson who has just finished reading Jeffrey Sachs on The End of Poverty, for example, might think that aid can provide an important solution to the world’s problems. One who has just completed William Easterly’s The White Man\u27s Burden or Dambisa Moyo’s Dead Aid, on the other hand, is likely to have quite different views on the utility of their country’s aid program. In a new Lowy Institute Analysis, Joel Negin provides a general introduction to the increasingly complex arena of international development assistance. Joel places the challenges of development assistance into a global context and provides an overview of global and Australian aid trends. Image: Julien Harneis / flick