Author: Fergus Hanson
Watching China’s reaction to the failed Rio-Chinalco deal and the decision to let Rebiya Kadeer into the country has been interesting. To an outside observer, the rhetoric and response from Beijing sometimes seem surprisingly immature.
But China doesn’t reserve its overzealous responses for the big picture multi-billion deals and alleged terrorists. In 2008, I released a policy brief on China’s aid program in the Pacific. The Chinese Foreign Ministry opted to counter with an official rebuke at a news conference, calling it ‘totally pointless and unacceptable’. When this year’s version of the report, which tracks China’s aid giving in the region, came out, it was the Communist Party mouthpiece, the Global Times that laid in.
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Author: Graeme Dobell
The problem for Australia’s aid bureaucrats is that spending nearly $4 billion doesn’t necessarily buy much respect in Canberra. Or bureaucratic power.
Being an efficient spender of cash is not to be scoffed at. AusAID has developed important skills: running tenders, operating contracts and transferring money. But the institutional effect is that AusAID doesn’t always get invited to the policy table. When invited, it speaks last.
The process of selecting a new Director-General of AusAID will force the Rudd Government and Foreign Affairs to confront what it wants to do with aid. As noted in my previous column, Bruce Davis headed AusAID for a decade. That is an unusual tenure for almost any era. At the end, the Government announced that Davis was going and then had him gone in only three days.
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Author: Andrei Lankov, Kookmin University, Seoul
Why is Pyongyang Striking Back?
Foreign Aid and Changes in the International Environment
Why is the North Korean leadership so eager to move backward? Given that this same leadership grudgingly tolerated dramatic liberalization in the late 1990s, what changes in the domestic and international situations made this turn of policy, first, possible and, second, desirable?
In order to answer these questions other important changes to the international position of the North Korean regime that occurred between 2000 and 2002 must be briefly considered. From 1998 to 2008 South Korea was governed by left-leaning administrations whose approach to North Korea was known as the Sunshine Policy. This policy envisioned a dramatic increase in unilateral aid to North Korea, typically without any pre-existing conditions. Thus, the amount of aid provided through both government and private channels increased dramatically around 2000, emphasized by the first Korean summit in 2000. The surge in aid was accompanied by a dramatic increase in trade and commercial exchanges, frequently subsidized by South Korea and therefore differing very little from direct aid.
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Author: Satish Chand
The level of access to basic services such as primary education and basic healthcare varies considerably across the nations of the Southwest Pacific. PNG ranks low, if not the last, on this count. Its geography in the form of the rough terrain and archipelagic nature, history in terms of a highly fragmented and sometimes strongly divided society, and climatic conditions which makes malaria (and other vector-born diseases) endemic to the nation is major handicaps to universal and effective delivery of basic services. The recent arrival and galloping spread of HIV compounds the problems many fold.
Education is critical for development. Read more…
Author: Satish Chand
The recent Australian generosity to Nauru has the potential to reduce poverty and save the need for further transfers down the track. This would be the preferred outcome, but one likely to be achieved only if aid was effective in inducing development. There is no guarantee of that outcome. Worse still, large sums of unencumbered aid can undermine development by creating an expectation of ongoing support and the basis for a welfare state. As a taxpayer, I will be appalled by such an outcome.
What could be done to maximise the chances of aid being effective in inducing development? Read more…
Author: Benjamin Reilly (from opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal)
History has a funny way of repeating itself. In a little-reported development last month, Japan offered to contribute peacekeepers to the Australian-led stabilization mission in the Solomon Islands—the site of some of the fiercest fighting between Japanese and Allied forces of the Pacific campaign in World War Two. While the prospect of Japanese troops returning to Guadalcanal may raise eyebrows on both sides of the Pacific, this is a positive development: It signals Japan’s willingness to cooperate with Australia and other liberal democracies in securing regional stability—and to balance the growing weight of China.
Japan’s offer follows from the annual Trilateral Security Dialogue between the U.S., Japan and Australia, as well as the Joint Declaration on Security Cooperation between Australia and Japan signed in March 2007.
Help is certainly needed in the South Pacific. The Solomon Islands government collapsed in 2002, necessitating armed intervention from Australia and other neighbours. Fiji still has not recovered from its 2006 coup, Papua New Guinea remains volatile, and deep-seated problems of weak governance, conflict and corruption afflict much of the region. For this reason alone, Japan’s willingness to re engage in the Pacific Islands should be encouraged.
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Author: Dominic Meagher
(image: World Bank’s East Asia blog)
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) opened its High Level Conference on World Food Security today in the midst of soaring world food prices. From the Conference website:
An estimated 850 million people in the world today suffer from hunger. Of those, about 820 million live in developing countries.
850 million is more than 1 person in every 8 people on the planet. The World Bank says
:
High food prices are a matter of daily struggle for more than 2 billion people. High prices threaten to increase malnutrition, already an underlying cause of death in over 3.5 million children a year. * An estimated 100 million people have fallen into poverty in the last 2 years * Prices are expected to stay high through 2015
This is far from a simple problem. In it are tied the issues of climate change, international trade, security, economic development, sustainability, equity, corruption, race relations (think Zimbabwe), fiscal and monetary policy, bioethics and religion… thorny is an understatement. Short term solutions are likely to focus on food aid to countries suffering most from high prices. More systemic solutions are likely to get bogged down in politics. But the conference is continuing, so there is still hope. Suprisingly, there seems to be more disagreement about the causes than the solutions. And there isn’t even complete agreement on the primary question: are high prices really a problem? Read more…
Author: Aaron Batten
The Brenthurst Foundation published an interesting Discussion Paper last week drawn from the 2008 Tswalu Dialogue on ‘Towards Conflict Resolution Best Practice’. The dialogue consisted of key leaders who have been involved in institutional development and conflict resolution across the African region.
Amongst the groups more interesting findings was the importance placed on seeing the resolution of conflict and progress in institutional development as a long-term process rather than an event in itself. The report also highlighted the ability of donor interventions to ‘freeze’ rather than resolve ‘conflict’ situations.
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Author: Aaron Batten
One of the biggest questions facing the Australian Government which hasn’t received much discussion in the blog world is how technical assistance is being delivered in PNG and the Solomon Islands and perhaps more importantly who delivers it.
Take the PNG example. The technical assistance program is based around two sorts of staff. Those transplanted from Australian Government agencies in Canberra (originally under the Enhanced Cooperation Program (ECP) but now renamed) and a more general Advisory Support Facility (ASF), which sources contractors from across the country and internationally.
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Author: Aaron Batten
The Blogoshpere has made a number of insightful comments about AusAIDs first Annual Review of Development Effectiveness Report (ARDE) report. On the whole commentators appear to be happy with the frankness of the report providing quite an honest assessment of the constraints facing the aid program. (See Andrew Leigh (ANU) and Jenny Hayward-Jones (Lowy)).
Amongst some of the more interesting findings of the report was that at approximately 50 per cent of its expenditure Australia gives more aid in the form of technical assistance than any other donor – the majority of which goes to the Pacific. This is hardly ground breaking news but it does raise some interesting questions.
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