"Attracting financial capital is essential for economic growth in developing countries, but can often tragically foster nondemocratic politics. Consider, for example, the impact of foreign aid. Since 2008 Ethiopia has been one of the largest recipients of U.S. aid in Africa, averaging around $80...

Measured in per cent of their Gross National Product (GNP), western industrialised countries currently spend far less on development aid than they did ten years ago. This is partly due to the very limited usefulness of the prevailing concept of development aid.

According to the purist view development policy amounts to the pursuit of its main objective as against those of foreign, economic and agricultural policy, i. e., to ensure that donor interests should give way as far as possible to this target. It is however self-evident that “practical...