Most of us will either pay part of our tax towards our government’s development industry, or will use a service that’s partly funded by another country’s development agency. The development industry has reinvented its strategy pretty much once every ten years since it was founded in the 1950s, partly because it’s so hard to define what ‘development’ really means. From focusing on supporting states to supporting markets, it’s shifted in line with global politics.
Aid is essentially anything that’s given from one country to another in the name of helping people in need. Most of us either give aid voluntarily or as part of our taxes, or receive services from an organization partly funded by aid from around the world. Although the intention behind it is often a good one, some people question whether aid creates more problems than it solves.
The ‘resource curse’ or ‘Dutch disease’ tries to explain why countries that are richer in natural resources are poorer, have less economic growth and are less democratic. Its a paradox of economics – surely the countries and societies with the most valuable resources should be rich, not poor? What’s going wrong?
