Posted by Eugene Volokh: Foreign Aid and "Generosity": I've often heard the U.S. faulted for contributing less to Third World countries than other developed countries do. Of course, the U.S. is larger and richer, so it contributes more total dollars, but the charge is that we don't contribute as much as a percentage of our GNP. One standard response is that we do contribute more than other countries as a percentage of our GNP when you add private contributions.
Can anyone give me a URL for any authoritative figures that provide data on this? I'm looking for real data from reliable sources. [1]This page which I've found, which seems to take seriously private giving, gives data that puts us near the bottom middle of the pack, if you exclude personal remittances from U.S. residents to their family members. The U.S. government aid, according to it, is at 0.14% of U.S. GNP; if one adds a wide range of private giving ($34 billion on top of the government $16 billion), that gets to roughly 0.45%; if one adds prviate giving minus remittances, that gets to roughly 0.28%. By way of comparison, Norway gives 0.92%, France 0.41%, the UK 0.34%, Germany 0.28%, and Canada 0.26%, though that doesn't include any private giving or remittances for those countries. Nonetheless, I have no way of gauging the author's credibility. (I'm not sure whether remittances should be included, because while they are a measure of the degree to which America actually helps foreign countries, they probably aren't a good measure of American "generosity" generally, since spending money on one's family members -- and especially children -- tends to be seen as at least a different kind of generosity than spending money on relative strangers.) Of course, one could still argue (1) that we have no particular obligation to be generous to other countries, either through our government or directly; (2) much aid is wasted and even counterproductive; and (3) the better measure of our helpfulness to the rest of the world, or our generosity to it, must include trade, security support, and so on. Any or all of these points may be quite valid. Still, since so much discussion has focused on whether we are in fact more or less generous than most other countries in terms of aid alone, with people making claims for both the "more generous" and "less generous" numbers given that metric, I'd love to see some solid data on this. References 1. http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Debt/USAid.asp _______________________________________________ Volokh mailing list [email protected] http://highsorcery.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/volokh
