Documents development aid 28 results

"In a groundbreaking book, based on six years of on the ground reporting, expert David Rieff offers a masterly review about whether ending extreme poverty and widespread hunger is within our reach as increasingly promised.

Can we provide enough food for 9 billion (2 billion more than today) in 2050, especially the bottom poorest in the Global South? Some of the most brilliant scientists, world politicians, and aid and development persons forecast an end to the crisis of massive malnutrition in the next decades.

However, food rights campaigners (many associated with green parties in both the rich and poor world) and traditional farming advocates reject the intervention of technology, biotech solutions, and agribusiness. Many economists predict that with the right policies, poverty in Africa can end in twenty years. “Philanthrocapitalists” Bill Gates and Warren Buffett spend billions on technology to “solve” the problem, relying on technology.

Rieff, who has been studying and reporting on humanitarian aid and development for thirty years, puts the claims of both sides under a microscope and asks if any one of these efforts will solve the crisis. He cites climate change, unstable governments that receive aid, the cozy relationship between the philanthropic sector and agricultural giants like Monsanto and Syngenta, that are often glossed over.

The Reproach of Hunger is the only book to look at this debate refusing to take the cherished claims of either side at face value. Rieff answers a careful “yes” to this crucial challenge to humanity's future. The answer to the central question is yes, if we don't confuse our hopes with realities and good intensions with capacities."

"With serious impacts of climate change looming in a few decades, but current poverty still high in the developing world, we ask how to spend development aid earmarked for the poor. Poverty reduction tends to be strongly linked to economic growth, but growth impacts the environment and increases carbon-dioxide emissions. So can greener growth that is more climate-resilient and less environmentally damaging deliver large-scale poverty reduction? Can aid be used for effective poverty reduction now without affecting carbon emissions substantially? We argue that there are bound to be trade-offs between emissions reductions and a greener growth on the one hand, and growth that is most effective in poverty reduction. We argue that development aid, earmarked for the poorest countries, should only selectively pay attention to climate change, and remain focused on fighting current poverty reduction, including via economic growth, not least as future resilience of these countries and their population will depend on their ability to create wealth and build up human capital now. The only use for development aid within the poorest countries for explicit climate-related investment ought to be when the investments also contribute to poverty reduction now, including for increasing resilience to current impacts of environmental shocks, or when the investments done now have serious intertemporal ‘lock-in' problems so that they have implications also for when climate change bites by 2050. In an annex, we offer a series of concrete principles to judge development spending."

"Among the EU member states, increasing immigration has led to a recent debate over changes to European refugee and migration policies. The desire among the poor to escape from a hopeless economic and social situation in their home countries is the most common impetus for their migration. As the EU is the world's biggest donor of public development aid, new approaches in European development politics are much needed to increase the effectiveness of this aid and to create a sustainable improvement of the economic situation among the poor. This article focuses on a new approach to implement more efficient and cost-effective development strategies that include individual time preference as well as insights from behavioural and experimental economics."

"The Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in 1995, was critical in making gender equality a development goal and adopted gender-mainstreaming as its primary mechanism to achieve this. Effective implementation of gender-mainstreaming involves changing both the internal organization and the external operations of development agencies to ensure that gender is integrated throughout the life cycle of all policies, programmes and practices. This paper assesses gender-mainstreaming in the development co-operation strategies and activities of three Nordic countries—Denmark, Finland, and Sweden—in two aspects. The first aspect focuses on the central level of development agencies in terms of strategies, operations, and structures while the second component examines gender-mainstreaming at the embassy level, in terms of gender-mainstreaming in implementation and interventions for advancing gender equality."

"Les pays du sud sont aujourd'hui en position inégale face à la libération des échanges. Nombre d'entre eux ne pourront tirer profit de l'ouverture des frontières qu'à condition de renforcer et de moderniser leurs économies. L'amélioration de la compétitivité des secteurs productifs fait partie des missions de l'aide publique au développement. Des programmes de mise à niveau des entreprises sont développés dans des économies du sud, avec le soutien de la communauté internationale. Par des actions de modernisation de l'environnement des affaires et d'amélioration de la compétitivité des entreprises, ces programmes s'éfforcent de préparer les pays à une concurrence accrue.



Ce document, après avoir mis en évidence l'enjeu de la compétitivité du tissu productif dans le processus d'insertion internationale,présente le concept de mise à niveau des entreprises et développe deux exemples de programmes : celui, déjà très avancé, de la mise à niveau des entreprises en Tunisie et une tentative de transposition, encore exploratoire, dans la zone UEMOA"

"Le poids gigantesque de la Chine dans l'économie mondiale, en termes démographique, commercial et financier, n'est plus à démontrer. Le centre de gravité de l'économie mondiale se déplace-t-il pour autant vers l'Asie ? Selon l'auteur, la réponse est négative. La Chine n'est tout simplement pas encore prête à rivaliser avec les Etats-Unis. L'empire du Milieu ne devrait pas intégrer, d'ici à 2025, le club des pays riches, selon certains économistes comme Françoise Lemoine, si l'on retient comme critère le produit intérieur brut (PIB) par habitant. Le revenu moyen actuel d'un Chinois n'équivaut en effet aujourd'hui qu'à 18 % de celui d'un Américain. La hausse du coût de la vie et la montée du chômage risquent, en outre, d'aggraver la situation sociale en Chine. Pour des raisons davantage structurelles, le pays devrait également mettre du temps à devenir un foyer d'innovations technologiques, en raison notamment d'un environnement peu propice à l'entrepreneuriat."