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Home/ 10th Grade Research Project 2010/ Contents contributed and discussions participated by Yasmin Tandon

Contents contributed and discussions participated by Yasmin Tandon

Yasmin Tandon

Aid Needs Help - By Raymond Offenheiser | Foreign Policy - 1 views

  • confused and conflicting responsibilities, mandates and authorities, with no clear goals, and no shared vision.
  • very real costs for U.S. foreign policy and the world's poor.
  • El Salvador,
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • responsibility for U.S. aid is shared between 11 different government agencies, each with different agendas and sometimes conflicting priorities.
  • Kenya,
  • United States procures its own HIV/AIDS test kits a
  • AIDS drugs at four times the cost other donors pay
  • Bangladesh
  • United States collects several times the amount in tariffs than it provides in development assistance, essentially taxing the very trade U.S. leaders tout as the solution to poverty
  • Cambodia, government officials typically find it easier to get information on aid resources from the Chinese government than from the U.S. government
  • Afghanistan -
  • civilian surge
  • humanitarian aid efforts has been promised -- two separate USAID contractors recently discovered by chance they were doing virtually the same project, in the same town.
  • 2 billion people -
  • trapped in poverty poses a singular challenge to the interests and values of the United State
  • What's This?TranslateWhat's This?Return
  • But his. government is still trying to address this 21st-century challenge with a 20th-century toolkit.
  • Previous attempts to reform the aid system have only complicated the situation.
  • The Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 integrates 140 different goals and priorities and 400 directives, and is executed by at least 12 departments, 25 different agencies, and almost 60 government offices. Moreover, successive presidents and congresses have often chosen to work around the act, enacting more than 20 additional pieces of legislation to achieve their foreign-aid goals. As a result, the existing system's mission has become muddled and confused, cluttered with earmarks, special coordinators, and loopholes.
Yasmin Tandon

The Debate over Foreign Aid - Council on Foreign Relations - 0 views

  • $4 billion--a 7 percent reduction in the already frugal
  • proposed budget of
  • $58.8 billion
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • -$14.6 billion--for global challenges like health, food security, climate change, and humanitarian assistance.
  • less than a quarter
  • wants to maintain a strong commitment to overseas assistance and global health.
  • budget request includes strategic
  • structural shifts to reach those goals, including aligning foreign assistance more closely with foreign policy objectives, demanding greater accountability from recipient governments, and delivering more "bang for the buck" by increasing cross-agency cooperation, streamlining delivery of goods and services, and reducing U.S. government redundancies.
  • In fact, $14.6 billion for the abovementioned global challenges amounts to a mere .38 percent of the $3.8 trillion federal budget.
  • Americans want to be magnanimous in helping poor nations but also want to reduce spending
  • The problem is that polls show that Americans actually believe that spending on overseas health, development, and humanitarian and anti-poverty programs is 15 to 20 percent of the national budget. In fact, spending has never exceeded 0.5 percent.
  • Very little of the government's budget is discretionary and easil
  • also lack the strong constituency backing of other government programs
  • global financial crisis
  • greatly increased the need for agricultural, poverty, and health programs
  • World Bank estimates show backward movement on key health and development targets since the onset of the economic crisis.
  • 2. Will the Obama administration's structural reorganization of foreign assistance achieve the administration's, or Congress', goals?
Yasmin Tandon

EBSCOhost: Obama at UN summit: foreign aid is 'core pillar of American power' - 1 views

  • development and foreign assistance are for the first time elevated to the level of key factors in US national security and economic policy.
  • "core pillar of American power."
  • ountry's multibillion-dollar foreign assistance programs
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • these programs have lost effectiveness and been marginalized since the end of the cold war.
  • regions in greatest need. I
  • tighter linkage of foreign aid to national security interests.
  • 145 countries attending the Millennium Development Goals Summi
  • new policy would promote global development for the 21st century.
  • focused more on economic growth
  • "democratic governance"
  • He offered food aid as an example of the change.
  • mpower communities to meet their own food needs
  • "That's not development," he said, "that's dependence."
  • "the US must focus its efforts in order to maximize long-term impact."
  • "The United States cannot do all things, do them well, and do them everywhere,"
  • development duties splintered
Yasmin Tandon

Foreign Aid for Development Assistance - Global Issues - 0 views

  • both the quantity and quality of aid have been poor and donor nations have not been held to account.
  • 1970,
  • world’s rich countries agreed to give 0.7% of their gross national income as official international development aid, annually
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Furthermore, aid has often come with a price of its own for the developing nations:Aid is often wasted on conditions that the recipient must use overpriced goods and services from donor countriesMost aid does not actually go to the poorest who would need it the mostAid amounts are dwarfed by rich country protectionism that denies market access for poor country products, while rich nations use aid as a lever to open poor country markets to their productsLarge projects or massive grand strategies often fail to help the vulnerable; money can often be embezzled away.
  • This web page has the following sub-sections:
  • “Trade, not aid”
  • excuse for rich countries to cut back aid that has been agreed and promised at the United Nations.
  • This target was codified in a United Nations General Assembly Resolution, and a key paragraph says:
  • The donor governments promised to spend 0.7% of GNP on ODA (Official Development Assistance) at the UN General Assembly in 1970—some 40 years ago
  • developed countries will rapidly and progressively take what measures they can … to reduce the extent of tying of assistance and to mitigate any harmful effects
  • make loans tied
  • Developed countries will provide, to the greatest extent possible, an increased flow of aid on a long-term and continuing basis.
  • almost all rich nations have constantly failed to reach their agreed obligations of the 0.7% target. Instead of 0.7%, the amount of aid has been around 0.2 to 0.4%, some $100 billion short.
  • the quality of the aid has been poor.
  • USA’s aid, in terms of percentage of their GNP has almost always been lower than any other industrialized nation in the world, though paradoxically since 2000, their dollar amount has been the highest.Between 1992 and 2000, Japan had been the largest donor of aid, in terms of raw dollars. From 2001 the United States claimed that position, a year that also saw Japan’s amount of aid drop by nearly 4 billion dollars.
  • Aid beginning to increase but still way below obligations
  • In 2009, the OCED and many others feared official aid would decline due to the global financial crisis. They urged donor nations to make aid “countercyclical”; not to reduce it when it is needed most, but those who didn’t cause the crisis.
  • And indeed, for 2009, aid did increase as official stats from the OECD shows. It rose 0.7% from just under $123 bn in 2008 to just over $123 bn in 2009 (at constant 2008 prices).
Yasmin Tandon

foreign aid definition of foreign aid in the Free Online Encyclopedia. - 0 views

  • economic, military, technical, and financial assistance given on an international, and usually intergovernmental level.
  • included at least three different objectives
  • rehabilitating the economies of war-devastated countries
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • strengthening the military defenses of allies and friends of the United States
  • promoting economic growth in underdeveloped areas
  • Aid may be given as a grant, with no repayment obligation, or a loan, and often comes with conditions that require that the recipient nation purchase goods or services with the aid from the donor nation.
  • In Recent Years
  • Although military aid continues to be provided
  • which finances the export of U.S. capital goods and agricultural products
  • Agency for International Development Agency for International Development (AID), federal agency created (Sept., 1961) to consolidate U.S. nonmilitary foreign aid programs. Originally an agency in the State Department, it has been a component part of the U.S...... Click the link for more information.  
  • Export-Import Bank
  • A large proportion of U.S. aid goes to Israel,
  • Egypt, and developing countries
  • U.S. foreign aid amounted to $10 billion (less than 0.6% of the federal budget)
  • gross domestic product (GDP) for foreign aid dropped from 2.75% in 1949 to 0.1%
  • Millennium Challenge aid program,
  • intended to target aid
  • toward poorer nations with good governance and open economies; the program places fewer restrictions on how participating nations use the aid.
  • Many nations in Europe and some in the Middle East and E Asia also have significant aid programs
  • Japan was the world's largest foreign aid donor, followed by United States, France, and Germany. Great Britain
  • 2001, the United States passed Japan as the world's largest donor as a result of Japanese cutbacks in foreign aid
  • 15% of foreign aid is provided by international bodies
  • International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and its affiliates, the International Development Association, and the International Finance Corporation;
  • Food and Agriculture Organization Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), specialized agency of the United Nations, established in 1945. The organization is governed by a conference composed of the entire membership (189 nations plus the European Union), which meets at least once biennially, and by..... Click the link for more information. .
Yasmin Tandon

Rethinking American Foreign Aid - US Foreign Aid - 0 views

    • Yasmin Tandon
       
      Blue- Background Yellow- Yes Green- No Pink- Need to read further to get more detail
  • zSB(3,3)Sponsored Links World Affairs DailyGlobal Headline News & Commentary from International Media Sourceswww.worldaffairsjournal.org Winter Programme on UNGeneva Winter Programme on the UN and International Developmentgraduateinstitute.ch/winter The Progressive Realista metablog about American foreign policywww.progressiverealist.org zob();if(zsForeign Policy Ads Budget Foreign Aid Foreign Policy Congress Federal Budget US Government Budget zSB(3,2);if(zsSponsored Links Life Experience DegreesNo attendance - No coursework Accelerated - Worldwide Shipmentwww.universityofdublin.org 16th Int'l Education Expo660 Exhibitors from 25 Countries Why not Check Now & Meet Yours?www.cieet.com January 10, 2008 America's foreign aid programs are controversial
  • Polls indicate most Americans want the United States to be a generous donor of foreign aid.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Explore US Foreign Policy
  • overestimate how much help we send overseas.
  • Others are concerned that our foreign aid falls far short of the global commitments made in the Millennium Development Goals.
  • And yet others say Western foreign assistance is focused more on "giving a man a fish" than on "teaching a man to fish."
  • The full report (215 pages, PDF) is available here.
  • The State Department budget plus all the foreign aid totals less than $40 billion (which is less than 1.5% of the federal budget). But Defense Department spending for this year, plus maintenance of America's nuclear arsenal, plus the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars
Yasmin Tandon

United States of America: Foreign Aid - 0 views

  • When the going gets tough, Americans keep giving
  • early $241 billi
  • 2002 set a new high
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • over 2001's total in current dollars
  • $240.92 billion in gifts equaled 2.3 percent of US gross domestic product.
  • amount represents a 0.5 percent decline since 2001
  • "the resilience and pervasiveness of giving in our culture,
  • Most donations come from individuals (76 percent of the total), and some nonprofit sectors were hit harder last year than others
  • The USA is only the world's biggest giver because it is rich.
  • most stingy and self-interested giver in the developed world:
  • USA is the
  • America is the world's most generous nation.
  • one of the most conventional pieces of 'knowledgeable ignorance
  • between
  • $6 and $15 billion in foreign aid in the period between 1995 and 1999
  • Japan gives more than the US,
  • between $9 and $15 billion in the same period
  • absolute figures are less significant than the proportion of gross domestic product (GDP, or national wealth) that a country devotes to foreign aid
  • US ranks twenty-second of the 22 most developed nations.
  • President Jimmy Carter
  • We are the stingiest nation of all'
  • Denmark is top of the table, giving 1.01% of GDP, while the US manages just 0.1%
  • long established the target of 0.7% GDP for development assistance
  • Denmark, 1.01%; Norway, 0.91%; the Netherlands, 0.79%; Sweden, 0.7%
  • US is highly selective in who receives its aid
  • 50% of its aid budget is spent on middle-income countries in the Middle East, with Israel being the recipient of the largest single share.
  • 80% of that aid itself actually goes to American companies in those foreign countries.
  • 3. Conclusion
  • The rest of the world
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