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Twenty Years Later: Has Paul Collier’s Most Uncomfortable Finding Been Conveniently Forgotten?

Having returned to Sweden after fifty years abroad—thirty of them with UNICEF—following the passing of my wife, I received my first pension payment into my Swedish bank account today. It amounted to almost SEK 100,000 for the month. That figure made me reflect.

I had always understood that bureaucracy in Spain could be, shall we say, a bit elaborate. Not inefficient, just fond of its own company. That is why an entire cadre of professionals exists here: the “fixers.” Mine is of Indian origin, arrived as a teenager, and never left. He now spends his days helping well-heeled Spaniards navigate their own administration, which they prefer not to engage with themselves. Even the natives, it seems, approach their bureaucracy the way one approaches a bull: with caution, respect, and ideally having someone else standing in front.

Moving home after 50 years in 11 different countries It is a life that never settles. It stretches across borders, across decades, across versions of yourself that no longer recognise one another. From the outside, it can look like success: a career built and a materially good life assembled. From the inside, it can feel empty.

An Industry Faces Its Own Redundancy For those of us who have spent years in the aid business, often congratulating ourselves along the way, recent coverage in The Economist may make for rather uncomfortable reading. Three articles in its March 21 edition, “Open for Business,” “Get Paid, Not Aid,” and “Meet Africa’s Richest Man”, paint a picture of Africa as a continent which has fared rather well after significant aid cuts and whose future looks increasingly independent of us. One can almost hear the collective throat-clearing across conference rooms in Geneva, New York, and Nairobi. The implication, though, is difficult to ignore: Africa’s economic prospects may improve not because of aid, but despite it. This is awkward. Aid, after all, is not merely a policy tool; it is an industry, complete with career paths, reporting frameworks, and an ability to declare success regardless of outcomes. For decades, we have framed aid as indispensable. Without it, we implied, development would st...

What has been your last assignment with UNICEF? Thomas Ekvall — Representative in Khartoum. How old do you feel? Older than I am, and less patient.

Detlef recently reminded me that capitalism was not "invented." In his view, it is simply the default state of affairs: how people tend to organise economic life when they are free to trade, specialise, and improve their circumstances. That is probably correct. Capitalism may not have needed inventing. What Adam Smith did, when he published An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in 1776, was something far more useful: he explained how it works.

Europe’s difficulties are often described as the creaking of an ageing civilisation. That is far too generous. The continent’s economic problems and strategic fragility are not acts of fate but the predictable result of choices by a fashionable, historically illiterate ideology: Wokeism. In embracing it, Europe has abandoned the very pragmatism that once made it formidable.

For more than six decades, Western governments have funnelled extraordinary sums into Africa through an elaborate aid machinery of UN agencies, NGOs, consultants and multilateral institutions. Yet despite declarations of progress, the continent has fallen further behind the rest of the world. The uncomfortable question is seldom asked: what if donors had simply given the money directly to Africa’s poorest households?

The link is to a BBC piece from today reporting on the recent Tanzanian election won by the incumbent with 96 per cent of the vote. I am in the article reflecting on aid, development and democracy.

If recent surveys are to be believed, Denmark is the least racist country in the world. A tiny, homogenous Nordic state of five million souls—polite, prosperous, and allergic to excess—has somehow become the global gold standard of tolerance. That should give everyone pause. The world’s moral map may not be quite as people think.

The West is running out of workers. Ageing populations and low birth rates mean that without immigration, our economies will shrink. Japan offers a sobering warning: it resisted large-scale immigration, and now its population is in free fall while its GDP is shrinking.

The article is intended for publication elsewhere. Before doing so, I would appreciate a critical review by present or former UNICEF colleagues. Thomas Ekvall This is not the picture we have been presented with over the past 60 years when Sweden gave more aid per person than any other country in the world. We were told that aid was an obligation in solidarity with the poor and less fortunate to lift them out of poverty and help them develop. The opposite seems to have happened. 

The so-called Global North has domineered the world for the past several hundred years. The term developed world was changed to the West and the West was in turn changed to the Global North. How Australia and New Zealand fit into the Global North, both in the east and the south, is not clear, but semantics may not matter. The Global North's dominance is coming to an end.

I once for a few years lived in a village right at the southern tip of Sweden. There was only one factory, it made machines for making sneakers. It was owned by a Jew, who came as a refugee. He was highly respected and looked up to and employed half the village. I worked for him during the summer holidays. I never heard a bad word about any Jew until I was perhaps 20 years old after the 1976 war. I was at the time in schools where there were pro-Palestinian left-wingers. Also, the Swedish Nazis, of whom there were many, burnt their brown shirts and got very quiet after 1945.

It must by now be obvious to all readers of this blog that most African countries are relatively poorer today than they were at the time of independence. In other words, their share of the global GDP per capita is lower today than it was at the time of independence. Likewise, indexes ranking countries around the world for corruption, democracy, governance, development, impunity, or human rights have African countries not only at the bottom, but often falling further behind the rest of the world. Very few have managed to change this trend. It must be clear that aid is not the solution to Africa’s problems as some European political leaders prefer to think, egged on by the 500,000-man strong aid industry, by far the biggest beneficiaries of aid. These European politicians, including Merkel, seem unaware that the trillions of dollars in various forms of aid to Africa over the past 50 years have had little if any impact. It is naïve to think that more of the same would make any meaningful ...

When considering the effect of aid, the case of Uganda might be illuminating. When the country attained independence in 1962, Uganda had a GDP of about $75 per person. At the time, the global GDP was around $500 per person. In other words, Uganda’s GDP per capita was 15 per cent of the global average. Today, the global average is $12,200 and Uganda’s GDP is around $1,000 per person - just above 8 per cent of the global average. This trend does not make for sustainable development. President Museveni has been in power for 37 of the 61 years that Uganda has been independent. Since Museveni took power, Uganda has been a top recipient of development assistance. In 2006, an election year, budget support provided by the international aid community amounted to 42 per cent of Uganda’s budget; it has since lessened to about 25 per cent. In 1992, the total aid package for Uganda was 19 per cent of the country’s GDP; it is today about 10 percent. In spite of this considerable financial developmen...

African countries have, since independence, received most of the world's development assistance, but remain among the most underdeveloped countries. Aid to Africa has come from many sources and in many forms: country-to-country development assistance; assistance through UN agencies; help through religious organizations; development aid through NGOs; soft loans from development banks; help with training and government capacity building; direct budget support, and many more. Many African countries have had parts of their sovereign debt forgiven; even private banks have written off loans to African nations. After countries gained independance, tens of thousands of African students received scholarships. On top of development aid, many African countries received emergency relief to deal with droughts, famines and other disasters. All this aid easily adds up to trillions of dollars in today's money. Even so, the world's poorest countries are in Africa. In relative terms, many Af...