No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
FOREIGN AID AND FREEDOM
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2024
Abstract
This essay examines the many problems with public and private development aid and argues that global liberalization of trade and immigration would have a greater direct effect in reducing global poverty. It also examines and rejects the view that people in rich countries have a strong moral obligation to give to the global poor. Such an obligation is in tension with an ethic that prizes personal projects. A political morality of equal respect and concern is congenial not with foreign aid, but with recognizing the agency of the global poor by lifting the many obstacles they currently face to participating in the market as producers and consumers.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- © 2024 Social Philosophy & Policy Foundation. Printed in the USA
Footnotes
*
College of Law, Florida State University, fteson@gmail.com. Competing Interests: The author declares none.
References
1 I adapt Deirdre McCloskey’s approach, developed in McCloskey, Deirdre, Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 11-42.
2 Information listed in Table 1 is drawn from Michele Wheat, “Which Countries Provide and Receive the Most Foreign Aid?” Wristband Resources, https://www.wristband.com/content/which-countries-provide-receive-most-foreign-aid/.
3 For public foreign aid supporters, see, e.g., Jeffrey Sachs, “The Case for Aid,” Foreign Policy, January 21, 2014, https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/01/21/the-case-for-aid/; Joseph Stiglitz, “Overseas Aid Is Money Well Spent,” Financial Times, April 14, 2002; George Ingram, “What Every American Should Know about U.S. Foreign Aid,” Brookings, October 15, 2019, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/what-every-american-should-know-about-u-s-foreign-aid/. Critics of public foreign aid include, e.g., Easterly, William, The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (New York: Penguin 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Coyne, Christopher J., Doing Bad by Doing Good: Why Humanitarian Action Fails (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.
4 Steven Radelet, “A Primer on Foreign Aid” (Working Paper Number 92, Center for Global Development, July 2006), https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/36066/2006_07_24.pdf.
5 See Sachs, “The Case for Aid” and the essays in Making Aid Work, ed. Abhijit Banerjee (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). The empirical studies are summarized in Sebastian Edwards, “How Effective Is Foreign Aid?” World Economic Forum, November 28, 2014, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2014/11/how-effective-is-foreign-aid/; according to that article, results are “fragile and inconclusive.” For health-related aid, see Eran Bendavid and Jay Bhattacharya, “The Relationship of Health Aid to Population Health Improvements,” Journal of the American Medical Association Internal Medicine (June 2014), https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/1861035.
6 The list above is somewhat distorted because it includes the total amount of aid per country. More accurate data would indicate the foreign aid per capita, both for donors and beneficiaries. For example, on the donors’ side, Norway, with a population of 5.46 million, would be a more generous country than the United States, with a population of 331 million. On the beneficiaries’ side, India is a highly populous country, so the amount of aid it receives per capita is lower than that of other beneficiaries that get less total aid. This qualification does not affect the point in the text.
7 Lauren Egan, “Biden to Send 20 Million U.S.-Approved Vaccines Abroad by End of June,” NBC News, May 17, 2021, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/biden-send-20-million-u-s-approved-vaccines-abroad-end-n1267596.
8 See Lomasky, Loren E. and Tesón, Fernando R., Justice at a Distance: Extending Freedom Globally (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 261–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 Martens, Bertin, “Introduction,” in Martens, Bertin, Mummert, Uwe, Murrell, Peter, and Seabright, Paul, The Institutional Economics of Foreign Aid (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 14 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Radelet, “A Primer on Foreign Aid,” 12.
11 Lomasky and Tesón, Justice at a Distance, 265.
12 A kleptocracy is a good example of an “extractive institution” in Acemoglu and Robinson’s sense; see Acemoglu, Daron and Robinson, James A., Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (New York: Currency, 2012)Google Scholar, esp. 79–83, 91–95.
13 My native country, Argentina, is a good example of a democratic kleptocracy.
14 See generally, Populism in Latin America, 2nd ed., ed. Michael Conniff (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2012).
15 There is ample evidence that elites in aid-dependent countries capture an important percentage of foreign aid. See Andersen, Jørgen Juel, Johannesen, Niels, and Rijkers, Bob, “Elite Capture of Foreign Aid: Evidence from Offshore Bank Accounts,” Journal of Political Economy 130, no. 2 (2022): 388–425 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
16 See Cruz, Cesi and Schneider, Christina J., “Foreign Aid and Undeserved Credit Claiming,” American Journal of Political Science 61, no. 2 (2017): 396–408 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
17 See Dichter, Thomas W., Despite Good Intentions: Why Development Assistance to the Third World Has Failed (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003)Google Scholar.
18 See Hayek, Friedrich A., “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review 35, no. 4 (1945): 519–30Google Scholar. Ludwig von Mises makes the same point in his “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth,” Collectivist Economic Planning, ed. Friedrich A. Hayek (1935; repr., Clifton, NJ: Augustus M. Kelley, 1975), 87–130.
19 Easterly, The White Man’s Burden, 60.
20 Coyne, Doing Bad by Doing Good, 20.
21 Coyne, Doing Bad by Doing Good, 70–71.
22 Easterly, The White Man’s Burden, 61. He recounts the failure of “shock therapy” in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union.
23 See Moshin S. Kahn and Sunil Sharma, “IMF Conditionality and Country Ownership of Programs” (Working Paper 01/142, IMF Working Papers, September 2001), https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2001/wp01142.pdf.
24 For a description of this important movement, see its website: https://www.effectivealtruism.org. For discussion of the philosophical aspects of effective altruism, see Greaves, Hilary and Pummer, Theron, ed., Effective Altruism: Philosophical Issues (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
25 Singer, Peter, The Life You Can Save (New York: Random House, 2009), 15–16 Google Scholar. This argument is essentially identical to the one he offers in Singer, Peter, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 1, no. 3 (1972): 229–43Google Scholar. For critical responses to his argument, see Peter Singer under Fire: The Moral Iconoclast Faces His Critics, ed. Jeffrey A. Shaler (Peru, IL: Open Court Publishing, 2009), chaps. 7–10.
26 Lomasky and Tesón, Justice at a Distance, 31–58; Lomasky, Loren, Persons, Rights, and the Moral Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987)Google Scholar.
27 For a fuller discussion, see Lomasky and Tesón, Justice at a Distance, 31–53.
28 Schmidtz, David, “Islands in a Sea of Obligation: Limits of the Duty to Rescue,” Law and Philosophy 19, no. 6 (2000): 686 Google Scholar.
29 Schmidtz, “Islands in a Sea of Obligation,” 687.
30 See Peter Murrell, “The Interactions of Donors, Contractors, and Recipients in the Implementation of Foreign Aid,” in Martens, Mummert, Murrell, and Seabright, The Institutional Economics of Foreign Aid, 69–108.
31 Schmidtz, “Islands in a Sea of Obligation,” 692–94.
32 Different is the case of severe oppression, where citizens are terrified and impotent. In such cases, help may be indicated. See generally, Tesón, Fernando R., Humanitarian Intervention: An Inquiry into Law and Morality, 3rd ed. (Adsley-on-Hudson: Transnational Publishers, 2005)Google Scholar.
33 See Ben Sachs, “Demanding the Demanding,” in Effective Altruism, ed. Greaves and Pummer, 137.
34 Though Sachs doubts, in “Demanding the Demanding,” that positing a strong moral obligation of charity will necessarily be counterproductive.
35 Lomasky and I develop the argument at some length in our Justice at a Distance, 31–58, 261–74.
36 In such cases, Bas van der Vossen and Jason Brennan propose “positive-sum compensation.” Bas van der Vossen and Jason Brennan, In Defense of Openness: Why Global Freedom Is the Humane Solution to Global Poverty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 112–27.
37 I discuss briefly a couple of those theories in the next section.
38 In this sense, see Risse, Mathias, On Global Justice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 111–15.Google Scholar
39 See Locke, John, Second Treatise of Government, in Locke: Two Treatises of Government , ed. Laslett, Peter (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 286 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Grotius, Hugo, On the Law of War and Peace, trans. Loomis, Louise Ropes (New York: Walter J. Black, Inc., 1949)Google Scholar, 2.2.2.1.
40 As Anna Stilz observes; see Stilz, Anna, “On Collective Ownership of the Earth,” Ethics & International Affairs 28, no. 4 (2014): 501–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
41 Risse, On Global Justice, 111.
42 Coyne, Doing Bad by Doing Good, 5.
43 “[I]n the two centuries after 1800 the trade-tested goods and services available to the average person in Sweden or Taiwan rose by a factor … of 10,000 percent.” McCloskey, Bourgeois Equality, 11.
44 Dworkin, Ronald, Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 5Google Scholar. I think that any ethic that prizes freedom and equal respect, such as Immanuel Kant’s, will reach the same result. Dworkin’s formulation is particularly apt for my purposes.
45 Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue, 5.
46 Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue, 5.
47 See Smith, Adam, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Kaakonsen, Kund (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 47 Google Scholar.
48 This is a central idea in Kant’s Doctrine of Right. See Kant, Immanuel, The Metaphysics of Morals, in Kant: Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 132–71Google Scholar.
49 Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue, 5–6, 446–52.
50 See Pogge, Thomas, World Poverty and Human Rights (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2002), 202–3Google Scholar.
51 See Steiner, Hillel, “The Global Fund: A Reply to Casal,” Journal of Moral Philosophy 8, no. 3 (2011): 328–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
52 Pogge, World Poverty, 202.
53 Steiner, “The Global Fund,” 329.
54 I have elsewhere criticized Pogge’s views on the causes of global poverty. See Lomasky and Tesón, Justice at a Distance, 20–22.
55 I am not suggesting that giving material aid is necessarily disrespectful. I hold that it is at best neutral in that regard.
56 The evidence is amassed by McCloskey, Bourgeois Equality, esp. 37–44.
57 See Vincent Geloso, “The Link between Prosperity and Freedom Is Even Stronger than You Think,” American Institute for Economic Research, December 6, 2019, https://www.aier.org/article/the-link-between-prosperity-and-freedom-is-even-stronger-than-you-think/.
58 I consider the empirical issue as settled. For the relevant numbers, see van der Vossen and Brennan, In Defense of Openness, 8–16. Even as harsh a critic of capitalism as G. A. Cohen recognizes that capitalism creates wealth. His objection is that capitalism does this by harnessing people’s objectionable traits, greed, and fear. See Cohen, G. A., Why Not Socialism? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 76–79 Google Scholar.
59 Acemoglu and Robinson, Why Nations Fail, 79–83.
60 See Tesón, Fernando R., “Why Free Trade Is Required by Justice,” Social Philosophy & Policy 29, no. 1 (2012): 126 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
61 Guido Pincione and I discuss those reasons in Pincione, Guido and Tesón, Fernando R., Rational Choice and Political Deliberation: A Theory of Discourse Failure (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 8–13, 39 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
62 See Douglas Irwin, “The Rise and Fall of Import Substitution” (Working Paper 27919, NBER Working Paper Series, 2020), https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27919/w27919.pdf.
63 “What Is Corruption?” Transparency International, https://www.transparency.org/en/what-is-corruption.
64 For varieties of corrupt behavior, see Rose-Ackerman, Susan and Palifka, Bonnie J., Corruption and Government: Causes, Consequences, and Reform, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 8–9 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
65 See Hodge, Andrew, Shankar, Sriram, Prasada Rao, D. S., and Duhs, Alan, “Exploring the Links between Corruption and Growth,” Review of Development Economics 15, no. 3 (2011): 474–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
66 Mo, Pak Hung, “Corruption and Economic Growth,” Journal of Comparative Economics 29, no. 1 (2001): 66 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
67 Hodge, Shankar, Rao, and Duhs, “Exploring the Links.”
68 See, e.g., the principle of independent judiciary endorsed by the United Nations, “Basic Principles on the Independence of the Judiciary,” United Nations, September 6, 1985, https://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/independencejudiciary.aspx.
69 Neither national constitutions nor international law give pride of place to productive rights of property and contract; therefore, judicial decisions will be predictably biased against the very rights that enable prosperity and growth. I examine the possible reasons for this in Tesón, Fernando R., “International Law, Public Reason, and Productive Rights,” in Economic Liberties and Human Rights, ed. Queralt, Jahel and van der Vossen, Bas (New York: Routledge, 2019), 133–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
70 Some of these countries are failed states, which are states that are not viable. I see no persuasive argument for these states to continue to exist as sovereign states. Why not establish an international administration over them or make them part of successful states? I will not pursue this idea here, however.
71 See, e.g., Irwin, “The Rise and Fall of Import Substitution.”
72 See the discussion in Lomasky and Tesón, Justice at a Distance, 12–24.
73 Lomasky and Tesón, Justice at a Distance, chaps. 4–5.
74 Van der Vossen and Brennan, The Case for Openness, 21 (emphasis in the original).
75 This doctrine has been strongly criticized by scholars, but it has not been repealed by the Supreme Court. See, e.g., Spiro, Peter J., “Explaining the End of Plenary Power,” Georgetown Immigration Law Journal 16, no. 2 (2002): 339–64Google Scholar; Ilya Somin, “Yes, Obama’s Executive Action Deferring Deportation for Millions of Immigrants Is Constitutional,” Reason Magazine, April 19, 2016, http://reason.com/archives/2016/04/19/yes-obamas-executive-action-deferring-de.
76 Chae Chan Ping v. U.S. (Chinese Exclusion Case), 130 U.S. 581 (1889), 603–4. This case is rightly derided for validating overtly racist immigration legislation, but the principle behind it remains largely untouched.
77 See Curtis Bradley and Jack Goldsmith, Foreign Relations Law: Cases and Materials, 5th ed. (Frederick, MD: Aspen Publishing, 2017), 155. The debate over former President Donald Trump’s executive order turned on whether it was a pretext for religious discrimination, not on the validity of the general power of the government to exclude. See Richard Gonzales, Joel Rose, and Merrit Kennedy, “Trump Travel Ban Blocked Nationwide by Federal Judges in Hawaii, Maryland,” National Public Radio, https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/03/15/520171478/trump-travel-ban-faces-court-hearings-by-challengers-today.
78 “Record High Remittances Sent Globally in 2018,” The World Bank, April 8, 2019, https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2019/04/08/record-high-remittances-sent-globally-in-2018#:~:text=The%20Bank%20estimates%20that%20officiallyof%20%24483%20billion%20in%202017.
79 “Remittances, Percent of GDP—Country Rankings,” The Global Economy, https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/remittances_percent_gdp/. In some Central American countries, the percentage hovers around 20 percent of their GDP.
80 See, e.g., Fayissa, Bichaka and Nash, Christian, “The Impact of Remittances on Economic Growth and Development in Africa,” The American Economist 55, no. 2 (2010): 92–103 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
81 See, e.g., Carrington, William J. and Detragiache, Enrica, “How Extensive Is the Brain Drain?” Finance & Development 36, no. 2 (1999): 46, 49 Google Scholar.
82 For a full discussion of the morality and economics of the brain-drain phenomenon, see Lomasky and Tesón, Justice at a Distance, 121–48.
83 See Dorward, Andrew and Morrison, Jamie, “Heroes, Villains, and Victims: Agricultural Subsidies and Their Impacts on Food Security and Poverty Reduction,” in Handbook on the Globalisation of Agriculture, ed. Robinson, Guy M. and Carson, Doris A. (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2015), 194–213 Google Scholar.
84 Julian M. Alston, Daniel A. Sumner, and Henrich Brunke, “Impacts of Reductions in U.S. Cotton Subsidies on West African Cotton Producers,” OXFAM, June 21, 2007, https://www.oxfamamerica.org/explore/research-publications/impacts-of-reductions-in-us-cotton-subsidies-on-west-african-cotton-producers/.
85 International case law usually focuses on the treatment of aliens once they are in a state’s territory. For example, the 1985 Abdulaziz case declared invalid the United Kingdom’s exclusion of husbands of lawful immigrants on equality and privacy grounds. It did not challenge the right of the United Kingdom to exclude everyone if it so wished. European Court of Human Rights, Case of Abdulaziz, Cabales, and Balkandali v. The United Kingdom, Judgment of May 28, 1985, http://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng#{"dmdocnumber":["695293"],"itemid":["001-57416"]}.
86 For a fuller discussion, see Tesón, Fernando R., “The Bourgeois Argument for Freer Immigration,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Classical Liberal Thought, ed. Henderson, M. Todd (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 176 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
87 Pogge, World Poverty, 29–30, 119–21.
88 Pogge, World Poverty, 29–30, 119–21. To the extent that wealthy countries benefit from despots’ borrowing privilege, they are guilty of cooperating with tyranny. The main blame falls, though, I think, on the shoulders of the despots themselves.
89 U.N. Millennium Development Goals are now called U.N. Sustainable Development Goals; see https://www.globalgoals.org/goals/.
90 The seventeen U.N. Sustainable Development Goals are: (1) end poverty in all its forms everywhere; (2) end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture; (3) ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages; (4) ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all; (5) achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls; (6) ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all; (7) ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all; (8) promote sustained, inclusive, and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment, and decent work for all; (9) build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization, and foster innovation; (10) reduce inequality within and among countries; (11) make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable; (12) ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns; (13) take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts; (14) conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas, and marine resources for sustainable development; (15) protect, restore, and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss; (16) promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all, and build effective, accountable, and inclusive institutions at all levels; and (17) strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development.