I think the most surprising thing we discussed in Econ 101 was how foreign aid can be so crippling to a country. So many people try to be helpful to try and alleviate the poverty or various reasons, but so few ever actually go visit those counties to see what the needs are. Broken bones are not fixed with bandaids, the same way economies are not helped with debt or charity. By taking away the opportunity to create a trade in some way by the local businesses, charity only provides a temporary fix that will expire at some point. Helping people discover business ideas or even assisting them in getting started is still aid, but it provides a lasting fix instead of a temporary fix. Help them fix the broken bone instead of giving them a bandaid.
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Short and sweet, directly to the point and I like that. It seems like many of the countries in the world justify helping as writing a fat check. You are correct, that does not always help, sometimes people actually need help and not a dollar to spend. That reminded me of everything going on with the war in Ukraine right now. The president of Ukraine asks directly for plans to fly over and protect their skies from airborne attacks. Instead, he gets ground vehicles. Obviously, he does not need ground vehicles because they have been doing good without them. He asked for plains because he needed plains. You are correct, stop putting bandaids on broken bones.
Hello I enjoyed reading your post. There were a lot of interesting things involved with Foreign aid. Ana Swanson a writer for the Washington Post supports that foreign aid actually hurts developing countries. She uses a graph in her article that shows the relationship between aid as a percentage of GDP and per capita growth. While aid as percentage of GDP was at an all time low the per capita growth was the best in all of Africa. When foreign aid as percentage of GDP was increasing per capita growth was dropping at an equal slope. (2021).
References
Swanson, A. (2021, November 25). Why trying to help poor countries might actually hurt them. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/10/13/why-trying-to-help-poor-countries-might-actually-hurt-them/