*The White Man's Burden

By William Easterly

(2006 Penguin Press, 448 pages)

*The Bottom Billion

Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It

By Paul Collier

(2007 Oxford University Press, 224 pages)

*Reinventing Foreign Aid

(2008 MIT Press, 567 pages)

By Nancy Birdsall - (Foreword), William Easterly (Editor)

Book Description

The urgency of reducing poverty in the developing world has been the subject of a public campaign by such unlikely policy experts as George Clooney, Alicia Keyes, Elton John, Angelina Jolie, and Bono. And yet accompanying the call for more foreign aid is an almost universal discontent with the effectiveness of the existing aid system. In Reinventing Foreign Aid, development expert William Easterly has gathered top scholars in the field to discuss how to improve foreign aid. These authors, Easterly points out, are not claiming that their ideas will (to invoke a current slogan) Make Poverty History. Rather, they take on specific problems and propose some hard-headed solutions.

Easterly himself, in an expansive and impassioned introductory chapter, makes a case for the "searchers"--who explore solutions by trial and error and learn from feedback--over the "planners"--who throw an endless supply of resources at a big goal--as the most likely to reduce poverty. Other writers look at scientific evaluation of aid projects (including randomized trials) and describe projects found to be cost-effective, including vaccine delivery and HIV education; consider how to deal with the government of the recipient state (work through it or bypass a possibly dysfunctional government?); examine the roles of the International Monetary Fund (a de-facto aid provider) and the World Bank; and analyze some new and innovative proposals for distributing aid.

Also from the New York University website...
To read review of Paul Collier's book "The Bottom Billion", published in The Lancet, October 27 2007,
To read review of Helen Epstein's book "The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDS", published in the New York Review of Books, August 16 2007, click here.
To read the Los Angeles Times opened "What Bono Doesn't Say About Africa", July 6 2007,
To read Foreign Policy article "The Ideology of Development", published in the July/August 2007 issue,  click here. To read responses  click here.
To read the most recent Sachs vs. Easterly debate (translated from Spanish and Aidspeak) click here , to read the original article in Spanish click here.
To watch the video of the Davos Aid Debate with Gates, Easterly, Sirleaf-Johnson and Wolfowitz click here.
To read exchanges with  Jeffrey D. Sachs click here.
To read paper "Was the Wealth of Nations Determined in 1000 B.C.?" (DRI Working Paper #26) click here.
To read paper "Was Development Assistance a Mistake?" (AEA Papers and Proceedings, forthcoming May 2007)  click here.
To read paper "Are Aid Agencies Improving?" (DRIWP No.25)  click here.