Pakistan has received more than $20 billion in external development assistance but has made little evident improvement in its social indicators. So Much Aid, So Little Development offers a fresh explanation for this outcome. The author, Samia Altaf, a physician and public health specialist, follows one major initiative, the Social Action Program developed by the Pakistani government in 1992 and funded by the World Bank to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. In an engrossing account that reads almost like a novel, at times hilarious, at others heartbreaking, she tells the story of the program’s shortcomings through a series of eyewitness vignettes. She begins with planning meetings in Islamabad, moves through layer after layer of the Pakistani bureaucracy down to the village health trainee, and then returns to Washington for the evaluation. At every stage, she finds skewed incentives, misplaced priorities, and inappropriate designs diverting the project from its original intentions and ambitions. In the process, Altaf introduces into the development conversation the human dimension that most frameworks have neglected to their detriment.

Foreword by Richard C. LeoneAcknowledgements1. Introduction2. Africa--So Little Development?3. Aid and Development in Africa4. Foreign Aid: The Donors5. The United States6. France and Britain7. Sweden, Italy, Japan8. The Multilaterals9. FindingsNotesBibliographyIndex Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Argues that western foreign aid efforts have done little to stem global poverty, citing how such organizations as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are not held accountable for ineffective practices that the author believes intrude into the inner workings of other countries. By the author of The Elusive Quest for Growth. 60,000 first printing.

Debunking the current model of international aid promoted by both Hollywood celebrities and policy makers, Moyo offers a bold new road map for financing development of the world's poorest countries.

Foreign aid is about charity. International development is about technical fixes. At least that is what we, as donor publics, are constantly told. The result is a highly dysfunctional aid system which mistakes short-term results for long-term transformation and gets attacked across the political spectrum, with the right claiming we spend too much, and the left that we don't spend enough. The reality, as Yanguas argues in this highly provocative book, is that aid isn't – or at least shouldn't be – about levels of spending, nor interventions shackled to vague notions of ‘accountability’ and ‘ownership’. Instead, a different approach is possible, one that acknowledges aid as being about struggle, about taking sides, about politics. It is an approach that has been quietly applied by innovative development practitioners around the world, providing political coverage for local reformers to open up spaces for change. Drawing on a variety of convention-defying stories from a variety of countries – from Britain to the US, Sierra Leone to Honduras – Yanguas provides an eye-opening account of what we really mean when we talk about aid.

The winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics upend the most common assumptions about how economics works in this gripping and disruptive portrait of how poor people actually live. Why do the poor borrow to save? Why do they miss out on free life-saving immunizations, but pay for unnecessary drugs? In Poor Economics, Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, two award-winning MIT professors, answer these questions based on years of field research from around the world. Called "marvelous, rewarding" by the Wall Street Journal, the book offers a radical rethinking of the economics of poverty and an intimate view of life on 99 cents a day. Poor Economics shows that creating a world without poverty begins with understanding the daily decisions facing the poor.

A new lens on development is changing the world of international aid. The overdue recognition that development in all sectors is an inherently political process is driving aid providers to try to learn how to think and act politically. Major donors are pursuing explicitly political goals alongside their traditional socioeconomic aims and introducing more politically informed methods throughout their work. Yet these changes face an array of external and internal obstacles, from heightened sensitivity on the part of many aid-receiving governments about foreign political interventionism to inflexible aid delivery mechanisms and entrenched technocratic preferences within many aid organizations. This pathbreaking book assesses the progress and pitfalls of the attempted politics revolution in development aid and charts a constructive way forward. Contents: Introduction 1. The New Politics Agenda The Original Framework: 1960s-1980s 2. Apolitical Roots Breaking the Political Taboo: 1990s-2000s 3. The Door Opens to Politics 4. Advancing Political Goals 5. Toward Politically Informed Methods The Way Forward 6. Politically Smart Development Aid 7. The Unresolved Debate on Political Goals 8. The Integration Frontier Conclusion 9. The Long Road to Politics