[wanabidii] Is Aid a Waste of Money?

At a recent book launch, I was on a panel on which we were asked whether we can show that aid is a good use of public money, if the problems it aims to tackle are complex. I replied with a half-remembered statistic, which (now that I have had a chance to look at the numbers) turns out to have been right. It was this:

If you add up all the aid that all OECD countries have given since they started counting it in 1960, and then assume that the only thing that this aid has achieved was the eradication of smallpox, then the whole thing would still be a bargain, costing less than half what the UK National Health Service spends on average to save a life.

The story of the eradication of smallpox is told in one of the chapters of the CGD book, Millions Saved. As is documented there, though the eradication of smallpox was mainly financed by the affected countries, the effort succeeded because of the contribution of foreign aid (though I acknowledge that no one can say for certain what would have happened in the absence of aid).

These days most of us do not remember how terrible smallpox was: it has killed more people in history than all wars put together. Since the last death from smallpox in 1978, somewhere between 60 million and 120 million premature deaths have been averted by its eradication.

If you divide the total amount of money we have spent on all aid from all donors to all developing countries put together by the minimum number of deaths averted only by the eradication of smallpox you get: $4,700,000 million in aid / 60 million deaths averted = $78,300 per death from smallpox averted.

Link:http://international.cgdev.org/blog/aid-waste-money

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