The folly of development aid

-- BEIJING – China spent tens of billions of dollars on a dazzling 2008 Olympics. It has sent astronauts into space. It recently became the world's second largest economy. Yet it gets more than $2.5 billion a year in foreign government aid - and taxpayers and lawmakers in donor countries are increasingly asking why.--
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Comment: Development aid has always been a folly. In the case of China it is just more obvious than elsewhere. Development aid has empowered the corrupt ruling class, has paralyzed local initiatives, has promoted centralization and has been statist from the begining to the end. No wonder that development aid has been a disaster form A to Z. For decades development "planning" has been the El Dorado for incompetent economists and other self-proclaimed "experts". Those were the winners of the redistribution. Peter Bauer (see books above) was one of the very few who said this what I say here early on. Like it is today, it was so back then: most in the economics profession were dumb like donkeys.