Foreign Policy on the global best and worst.
The Foreign Policy journal has two new indexes out I haven't seen mentioned anywhere else: the first (called the Commitment to the Development Index or CDI) ranks the rich countries in terms of global social responsibility. The second, the Failed States Index, ranks the world's sixty biggest hellholes (more on that one later).
This is the second CDI put out by Foreign Policy and the Center for Global Development, and the results are apparently pretty different from the first one because of methodology changes. But the methodology looks pretty good to me. CDI scores rich countries' development policy according to seven evenly weighted indices: public aid, trade liberality, investment in poor countries, security (or humanitarian intervention), technology or R&D policy, environmental policy, and migration policy. An overview of how they compiled the index is here. The results, all done up in pretty colours, are here.
The top global good samaritans according to the index are the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark, with the poorer European nations pulling up the rear along with Switzerland (mainly because of its traditional neutrality keeps it out of the security business) and Japan (because its post-WWII constitution also keeps it from engaging in humanitarian interventions.) Canada and the US finish sixth and seventh. We Canadians lead the world in openness to immigrants from developing nations (and hopefully will keep doing so) and on public spending on non-military R&D. We don't do so hot on the environmental measure, mainly (I'm guessing) because of all that heating oil we use.
The whole thing is worth reading but here are a few especially interesting tidbits:
1) The authors emphasize the problem of rich countries spreading their aid over lots of micro-projects in the poorest countries whose governments probably aren't equipped to oversee them. For example, Mozambique, with its combination of high poverty and relatively good governance, has attracted much donor interest in recent years, resulting in 1,413 new aid project commitments between 2000 and 2002. That amount is more than India (1,339 new projects) and China (1,328), countries with vastly more administrative staff to manage relationships with donors. Rich nations help Mozambique more when they jointly fund a few large-scale programs in, say, education or health. Last year, Tanzania even declared a four-month “mission holiday,” during which the country received only the most urgent visits by donor officials. Evidently, Tanzanian officials needed some peace so they could get work done.
2) Remittances from working abroad are a really, really big deal for poor countries: Remittances accounted for nearly 30 percent of Nicaragua's GDP in 2002, and 25 percent of Haiti's.
3) The US hasn't come anywhere close to being the global leader on humanitarian intervention over the past decade: Australia's 4,500-troop intervention to stop the Indonesian military's oppression of the East Timorese in 1999 (a large deployment for a country the size of Australia) earns that country third place [on the security scale]. Surprisingly, the United States comes in only 11th, despite contributing more than 50,000 personnel to interventions in Haiti, Somalia, Kosovo, and Bosnia. By the standards of its peers, this is not a large contribution after adjusting for economic size. Because data are incomplete for 2003, U.N.-approved postwar security aid for Iraq is not included this year—but it could be next year. The invasion of Iraq, however, will not be counted because no major international body approved it.
4) There are huge disparities in rich country aid generosity, with Norway leading the way both in public and private giving. In fact, Norway's population is twice as generous as the next private giving country, Switzerland, despite their relatively high tax rates and despite (or maybe because of) their high public aid quotient. Norway's and Denmark's governments give more than five times per capita what Canada's does (though the data are only up to 2002; I think we're doing sligthly better now).
I can't think of any way to sum up. Fascinating stuff.
This is the second CDI put out by Foreign Policy and the Center for Global Development, and the results are apparently pretty different from the first one because of methodology changes. But the methodology looks pretty good to me. CDI scores rich countries' development policy according to seven evenly weighted indices: public aid, trade liberality, investment in poor countries, security (or humanitarian intervention), technology or R&D policy, environmental policy, and migration policy. An overview of how they compiled the index is here. The results, all done up in pretty colours, are here.
The top global good samaritans according to the index are the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark, with the poorer European nations pulling up the rear along with Switzerland (mainly because of its traditional neutrality keeps it out of the security business) and Japan (because its post-WWII constitution also keeps it from engaging in humanitarian interventions.) Canada and the US finish sixth and seventh. We Canadians lead the world in openness to immigrants from developing nations (and hopefully will keep doing so) and on public spending on non-military R&D. We don't do so hot on the environmental measure, mainly (I'm guessing) because of all that heating oil we use.
The whole thing is worth reading but here are a few especially interesting tidbits:
1) The authors emphasize the problem of rich countries spreading their aid over lots of micro-projects in the poorest countries whose governments probably aren't equipped to oversee them. For example, Mozambique, with its combination of high poverty and relatively good governance, has attracted much donor interest in recent years, resulting in 1,413 new aid project commitments between 2000 and 2002. That amount is more than India (1,339 new projects) and China (1,328), countries with vastly more administrative staff to manage relationships with donors. Rich nations help Mozambique more when they jointly fund a few large-scale programs in, say, education or health. Last year, Tanzania even declared a four-month “mission holiday,” during which the country received only the most urgent visits by donor officials. Evidently, Tanzanian officials needed some peace so they could get work done.
2) Remittances from working abroad are a really, really big deal for poor countries: Remittances accounted for nearly 30 percent of Nicaragua's GDP in 2002, and 25 percent of Haiti's.
3) The US hasn't come anywhere close to being the global leader on humanitarian intervention over the past decade: Australia's 4,500-troop intervention to stop the Indonesian military's oppression of the East Timorese in 1999 (a large deployment for a country the size of Australia) earns that country third place [on the security scale]. Surprisingly, the United States comes in only 11th, despite contributing more than 50,000 personnel to interventions in Haiti, Somalia, Kosovo, and Bosnia. By the standards of its peers, this is not a large contribution after adjusting for economic size. Because data are incomplete for 2003, U.N.-approved postwar security aid for Iraq is not included this year—but it could be next year. The invasion of Iraq, however, will not be counted because no major international body approved it.
4) There are huge disparities in rich country aid generosity, with Norway leading the way both in public and private giving. In fact, Norway's population is twice as generous as the next private giving country, Switzerland, despite their relatively high tax rates and despite (or maybe because of) their high public aid quotient. Norway's and Denmark's governments give more than five times per capita what Canada's does (though the data are only up to 2002; I think we're doing sligthly better now).
I can't think of any way to sum up. Fascinating stuff.
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