Thinking about Development and Poverty Reduction

The Peace Corps experience has given thousands of volunteers an understanding that you can be friends with people in other countries, giving to and taking from that friendship. It is hard for a returned PCV to be chauvinistic. Thanks to John Kennedy for providing me the opportunity to serve.

To Move the World: JFK's Quest for Peace by Jeffrey Sachs.

Sachs has been a great advocate for the abolition of poverty. He has not only been an advocate, but has worked very hard at finding ways to help the poor. He shares my worry that too many Americans lack the empathy to grieve for the needlessly dead and dying from poverty.

I like Sachs' Millennium Villages project. I suspect that it is most important because it infuses the project villages with a spirit of innovation, in part by helping the villages succeed in the innovations that they themselves choose to make.

I do question his apparent belief that the United States should engage in "nation building". I am dubious because the term has been used in conjunction with wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan -- places where nation building has been especially difficult to achieve, and where the primary purpose of the U.S. involvement has not been to help the nationals build their own nation. As far as I can see, the political support for such efforts is not likely to suffice for the USA to stay the course.

Source: OECD

The U.S. is not an especially generous donor of official development assistance, and even were it to fulfill the 0.7% of GDP established (with U.S. leadership a generation ago) target, it would not have the resources to develop all the poor countries of the world. Moreover, as the graphs above show, much more money is flowing to developing countries through other than ODA. Official Development Assistance has been relatively static, while other finance has come to dominate, and is likely to grow again when the current financial crisis is overcome.

I think the key to the elimination of poverty is for poor countries to pull themselves out of poverty, and some have shown the way. Development assistance can support their efforts and can help people deal with the worst aspects of poverty, and should be organized to do so.

Perhaps the most important thing that the United States can do is to promote peace. Conflict is a terrible waste of human lives, not to mention social capital. The world is more peaceful since the USSR and the USA encouraged proxy wars around the world to promote or deter the spread of Communism. We in the USA should seek to expand that effort, encouraging our government to be a peacemaker.

People of good will everywhere can encourage all countries to strengthen institutions, especially legal, economic and political institutions. But I think it is the people within a nation who have to take the lead in developing their own institutions.

Maybe that realization too was a gift that I received from serving in the Peace Corps.