From: Amara Graps (amara@amara.com)
Date: Mon Aug 11 2003 - 01:02:44 MDT
An article from last May 3 in The Economist called: "Gauging
Generosity" offers a discussion of measures of "giving" and tries to
answer the question: "Which rich countries do most to help poor
countries?"
The Center for Global Development, a Washington think-tank, with
Foreign Policy magazine rates 21 rich countries used these measures
of help:
* aid,
* trade,
* the environment,
* migration,
* investment, and
* peacekeeping.
The Economist paper is here:
http://www.cgdev.org/rankingtherich/EconomicsfocusCDI.pdf
For the full perspective,
You should look at the table in the above paper to see a numbered
rating for each of the six categories, here, however is the average
calculated for the six categories:
Netherlands 5.6
Denmark 5.5
Portugal 5.2
New Zealand 5.1
Switzerland 5.0
Germany 4.7
Spain 4.7
Sweden 4.5
Austria 4.4
Norway 4.3
Britain 4.2
Belgium 4.0
Greece 3.9
France 3.8
Ireland 3.6
Italy 3.6
Finland 3.5
Canada 3.4
Australia 3.2
U.S. 2.6
Japan 2.4
It's an interesting evaluation. Norway is a generous aid donor, but
it has protectionist trade policies. America scores very well on
trade, but gives only 0.12% of its GDP in aid and scores poorly in
the other categories as well. Portugal is very high in investment
(it is a big investor in Latin America). New Zealand, Switzerland,
and Germany are extremely high in migration. Switzerland's migration
policy (the number of legal migrants it accepts relative to its
population) was surprising because it is not usually thought to be
open to foreigners. From my experience so far in Germany and Italy,
I can say the migration numbers for Germany and Italy seem about right
(Germany: 8.1 and Italy 1.1).
Of the aid and trade measures, the CGD has a sophisticated rating
system that adjusts foreign aid to the country's GDP, and the
quality of the aid. Of the quality of the aid, for example, it
deducts administrative costs, and it strips out principal and
interest repayments made by poor countries (because a lot of the
"aid" is in fact low-interest loans, not gifts).
The environmental index tries to capture how much rich countries
deplete global environmental resources, for example by measuring
greenhouse-gas emission per head. It also looks at their
contributions to clean technology and commitment to environmental
treaties. U.S. came out at the bottom, but The Economist points out
that it didn't consider investment in pharmaceutical or agricultural
research, where the U.S.'s contribution is significant.
The CGD index is a crude first stab at measuring the rich world's
help for the poor and the authors themselves admit that it has many
flaws, but it is a good first step that emphasizes that aid alone is
a misleading guide; trade and peace matter at least as much.
-- ******************************************************************** Amara Graps, PhD email: amara@amara.com Computational Physics vita: ftp://ftp.amara.com/pub/resume.txt Multiplex Answers URL: http://www.amara.com/ ******************************************************************** "Every exit is an entry somewhere else." --Tom Stoppard
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