| No. A lot of foreign aid is direct things like food, medicine, doctors, AIDS prevention programmes, vaccines for specific things, maternal care, containment of an Ebola epidemic, etc. Do you really think that e.g. Kenya is voting alongside EU members because the EU paid for a part of a highway between two cities in Kenya? Then yes, there are loans and grants for infrastructure things. > For the loan cases, the terms are often unaffordable, effectively handing effective control of the entire country to the entity who has the other end of the loan - it is the modern empire-by-debt. That's not true. The rates are very public, and while sometimes they are on the higher end, unaffordable is a stretch, and that's how loan rates work. It is inherently risky to give loans to a developing country with high corruption rates. That's why there are also lots of direct grants or direct physical aid with stuff instead of money. The IMF also sometimes gives loans with strict requirements on market reforms, which can be controversial. Notably in the former Soviet/Warsaw pact bloc, economic shock therapy under instruction of the IMF had some devastating short term consequences, and in some countries led to mass dubious privtisations. In most though, it paid off and led to rapid and sustained economic and social growth. |
I'm honestly disheartened by how much HN has degraded into Reddit now.