The Philosophers' Magazine - 4th quarter 2006

Page 54

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forum 54

Beyond the victim Paul Collier argues that fairness and compassion are no basis for development policy

poverty & the duty of assistance

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4th quarter 2006

The world has good reason to be concerned about African economic development. From 1960 to 2000, when other developing regions were growing at unprecedented speed, Africa stagnated. Average per capita income rose by only around 0.1% a year. Africa’s divergence from other developing regions has been speeding up: by the 1990s it was diverging at an astonishing 5% per year. Africa is falling behind fast, and parts of it are crumbling. Concern is natural. We in the rest of the world can base our concern on different ethical arguments: which we choose matters for our style and direction of assistance, and what is more important, for the ways Africans will think about their diffi culties Our ethical position becomes mirrored in Africa, precisely because the West is so intellectually dominant. Inadvertently, we shape the mental space inhabited by African elites. Why should the citizens of developed countries be concerned about what happens

Paul Collier is professor of economics at the University of Oxford and senior adviser to Tony Blair’s Commission on Africa

in developing countries? The answer coming from the development institutions such as the World Bank, and from the NGOs, is poverty; however the criterion of poverty reduction is not a reasonable ethical position, but the result of political expediency. There are better ethical bases for international concern. Over the past decade the measure of progress in development has come to be the reduction of absolute poverty. The choice of absolute poverty was essentially a political solution to a range of political problems. One problem was that the popular image of the World Bank had been so damaged by public perceptions that the agency needed an objective to signal that it “cared”. A second problem was that there was a need for some specifi c and measurable objective to assess agency performance. By the 1990s the electorates who funded aid doubted that it was effective, and as a result aid fi nance was declining. Further, poverty reduction offered an objective that could be embraced by all development agencies, and so offered the prospect of coordination that had otherwise proved elusive. Beyond these, the problem was that the left, which was the only part of the political spectrum that favoured aid, was mainly concerned about inequality within societies while being deeply suspicious of the normal process of economic growth: a focus on “the