Can a Country be a Donor and a Recipient of

Transcript:Can a Country be a Donor and a Recipient of:
Can a Country be a Donor and a Recipient of Aid? Ravi Kanbur www.kanbur.dyson.cornell.edu IGIDR Silver Jubilee Conference December 1-3, 2012 Outline Introduction: The Politics of Aid to Middle Income Countries Moral Salience of the National State: Global Rawlsians versus Rawls Global Poverty Minimization Some Operational Considerations: The Case of IDA Summary and Conclusion Political Optics (1) Recent spats over British Aid to India. Also, India and IDA is a live issue right now. Northern taxpayer perspectives—India is now a MIC, it is a nuclear power, it has a space program, its business leaders are buying up northern factories. And they have their own aid program! Why can’t they help their own poor? Arguments are particularly sharp for bilateral aid, but they apply equally to multilateral concessional assistance. Political Optics (2) Perspectives of Indian Policy Making Elite: Receiving aid is not in keeping with MIC status, G20 status, demand for permanent seat on UN security council etc. In fact, India should give more aid to other developing countries. India is a MIC, but it has 400 million poor people. If resources are available from the outside to address this, we should access them. Pragmatic faction: if there is money on the table, why not access it if it can done at not too much cost to geopolitical ambitions. (This argument has more weight in financially difficult times) Note: arguments are particularly sharp in the case of aid from former colonial power; but they should apply equally to aid from multilateral agencies. Political Optics (3) Ultimate resolution of all this will of course be in the political domain, and political optics will be crucial. But in this paper I look at the issue from an analytical perspective and ask three questions. How is the moral responsibility to help a poor person mediated by the average well-being of the country in which that person lives? Given equal moral responsibility to help the poor in the world no matter where they are, is it a rational outcome for a country to be a recipient and a donor of aid? How, operationally, should the World Bank’ concessional assistance window, IDA, handle the forthcoming graduations of MICs from its ranks? Global Rawlsians versus Rawls (1) A powerful line of argument in political philosophy has been the application of Rawls to the Global arena. First, recall the (simplified) Rawlsian “maximin” argument. Alternative proposals for just constitutions