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CIAO DATE: 05/05
Foreign Affairs
The Development Challenge
By Jeffrey D. Sachs
Jeffrey D. Sachs is Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and Director of the UN Millennium Project, which in January issued the report Investing in Development: A Practical Plan to Achieve the Millennium Goals. He is also the author of the new book The End of Poverty.
Promises, Promises
As a matter of stated policy, there is no doubt that Washington is committed to supporting economic development in impoverished countries. In September 2000, it joined the UN in issuing the Millennium Declaration, in which the world pledged to cut extreme poverty in half and reduce child mortality by two-thirds within the next 15 years (aims later formalized as part of the Millennium Development Goals). In March 2002, the United States and the international community adopted the Monterrey Consensus, which laid out a multifaceted strategy to achieve these objectives by promoting the private sector in developing countries, opening trade with them, and increasing official development assistance (ODA). That year, the U.S. National Security Strategy promised to "secure public health," "emphasize education," and "continue to aid agricultural development" in low-income countries. "The United States and other developed countries," the document asserted, "should set an ambitious and specific target: to double the size of the world's poorest economies within a decade."
Most Americans, and perhaps most senior U.S. government officials, believe that the United States has been following through on such commitments. The U.S. response, public and private, to December's Indian Ocean tsunami has seemed to confirm the nation's generous engagement with those in need. Ironically, though, this outpouring of concern may obscure rather than clarify a deeper truth. Other than in response to disasters--famines, floods, and earthquakes--U.S. assistance for the world's poorest countries is utterly inadequate. It falls far short of meeting the needs of recipient countries, fails to tap into the vast U.S. capacity for providing aid, does not fulfill Washington's many promises to fund development adequately, and is a small fraction of what Americans believe the U.S. actually provides.
Without a new approach, Washington risks undermining the most important international development goals that the world has accepted--and plunging the international community into a maelstrom of recrimination. Without dramatic reform, the United States will increasingly be tarred as a country ready to invest in war, and perhaps in emergency relief, but not in peaceful development. The number of failed states will increase, spreading disorder and threatening global and national security.
Only a new U.S. international development strategy can avoid this outcome by achieving the objectives set forth in the Millennium Declaration, the Monterrey Consensus, and the National Security Strategy. Embarking on a new, practical course of assistance will have short-term costs, but the long-term benefits will far outweigh them. Continued failure, on the other hand, will be far too expensive to bear.
The Development Mirage
The Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development defines official development assistance as the sum of grants and sub-market-rate loans made to developing countries to promote economic development and welfare. Military aid is not counted, nor is aid to high-income countries such as Israel. Even with these parameters, the DAC definition is too expansive to measure real assistance for economic development, but it nonetheless gives a systematic measure of U.S. foreign assistance.
By the DAC's definition, in 2003 (the most recent year for which comprehensive ...