Category: Aid, trade and debt
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Organised Crime Thrived During the Coronavirus Pandemic
Criminal Contagion: How Mafias, Gangsters and Scammers profit from a Pandemic is a recent study produced by the Global Initiative against Transnational Organised Crime. As the title suggests the book is an exploration of how Organised Crime has exploited opportunties during the Pandemic, and been thriving as a result. As lockdowns closed down businesses, Organised…
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UK government to cut aid
The UK Parliament voted on Tuesday to cut Overseas Aid from 0.7% of GDP to 0.5% of GDP, a cut which The Guardian refers to as a ‘hammer blow’ for some of the world’s poorest peoples facing persecution in countries such as Yemen and Syria. This is an important update for any student studying the…
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Fair Trade and Development
Fair Trade is where companies and consumers pay more than the free-market rate for products to ensure that workers receive a decent wage for their products. Typically this involves consumers in developed countries paying a higher price for agricultural products such as coffee, chocolate and bananas to the workers in developing countries. The Fair Trade…
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How Europe’s Agricultural Polices Hurt Africa
International trade policies seem to benefit large scale industrial farmers in Europe and hurt smaller scale farmers in Africa. This is according to a recent 2018 DW documentary which focuses on how Industrial technology, large scale industrial production and European Union Subsidies make EU agricultural products much cheaper than locally produced African agricultural products, despite…
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How is UK Development Aid money spent? some useful tracking tools
Even with the recently announced cuts to UK development aid, the United Kingdom will still be spending around £10 billion a year on overseas aid from 2020 onwards. £10 billion is a lot of money, so it’s fair enough that we should be able to keep track of where our tax money is going! Thankfully…
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Is the UK right to cut Overseas aid to 0.5% of GNI?
The United Kingdom has been a world leader in providing Official Development Aid in recent years. In 2019 the UK was the third largest donor in absolute terms and the 5th largest relative to it’s Gross National Income. However, that is now set to change as in November 2020 the UK government announced that it…
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The Problem of Private Sector Debt and Coronavirus in Developing Countries
This recent report by Global Justice Now highlights the increasing role of private sector companies in providing loans for development to developing countries. Some of these loans often have quite significant interest rates, as you can see from this chart – the longer the loan term, the higher the interest rate: NB the institutions holding…
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The US-UK Trade Deal: More Neoliberalism?
Brexit hasn’t been in the news much since Covid-19, but we’re still leaving the European Union in January 2020, which means we haven’t got long to get some trade-deals in place with several different countries. The United States is one of the UK’s largest trade partners, with around $250 of trade between the countries every…
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Outline and explain two reasons why trade does not always promote development (10)
One reason is that poorer countries tend to export low-value primary products such as agricultural goods, while richer countries export higher value goods. Frank (1971) argues this is a legacy of colonialism during which rich countries made their colonies specialize in exporting one primary product such as sugar or cotton back to the ‘mother land’.…
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Does Aid Work? The Aid Audit
Does Aid Work? The Aid Audit: Below is a summary of this World Service Podcast from 2015 Intro ‘Fifteen years ago, German journalist, Ulli Schauen helped compile a book of the top 500 global aid programmes… they ranged from schools for Maasai nomads to support for organic farming to training for volunteer sexual health workers.…
