Failures in Aid
Altbach, Philip G.
Failures in Aid FROM AID TO RE-COLONIZATION: LESSONS OF A FAILURE, by Tibor Mende. Pantheon Books. 317 pp. $10. reviewed by Philip G. Altbach The domination of the advanced...
...Perhaps when some of the right questions are asked and people are aware of the key elements of the problems of the relationships between the rich and the poor nations, it will be possible to begin to provide some answers...
...Not only is money wasted but highly trained manpower needed for development is lost...
...No panaceas are offered in this insightful and depressing volume...
...Illegal repatriation of "hard" currencies, payment of license fees, and profits of foreign corporations further eat up export earnings...
...His solution for the problem is less clear...
...He points out that almost fifty per cent of Latin American graduate engineers work in the United States, and that two-thirds of the health services of Great Britain are manned by Indian and Pakistani doctors...
...These groups tend to be the chief beneficiaries of aid, and they create major distortions of the economies of their nations...
...Mende presents no devil theories concerning the system, but he points to two main culprits—the professional aid-givers and policy makers in the advanced nations and the ruling classes in the underdeveloped areas who benefit from the status quo...
...The urbanized "consumer" class loses touch with the realities of life of the nation, and the contradictions created by this situation will inevitably have repercussions on the nation as a whole...
...Altbach is associate professor of educational policy studies at the University of Wisconsin...
...Despite the fact that Mende, a former senior official of the United Nations and now a professor at the Sorbonne, is judicious in his accusations, one cannot but place the lion's share of the blame for the present situation on the policies of the industrialized nations...
...Much foreign aid is tied to the purchase of imports from the donor nation—thus the aid goes indirectly into the pockets of businessmen in the industrialized nation—and the developing nation often has to pay interest on development loans...
...Much of the material provided as foreign aid by the industrialized nations, including sophisticated military equipment and the products of a "high" technology, may not be especially relevant to the needs of the developing nations...
...he advocates the virtual ending of foreign aid as it has traditionally been known, but he does not specify how the underdeveloped nations are to break from the "cycle of domination" which he so dramatically describes...
...reviewed by Philip G. Altbach The domination of the advanced industrialized nations of the Northern Hemisphere over the underdeveloped nations of the Southern Hemisphere is the focus of this important book...
...Mr...
...When Mende adds to the equation population pressures, the rapid depletion of the world's resources by the industrialized nations, and other problems, the reader is left to wonder what can be done...
...The advanced nations control the market prices of much of the world's raw materials supplied by the developing areas and thus place the underdeveloped countries at a further disadvantage...
...A number of the underdeveloped nations now have to pay virtually all of the foreign aid they receive to the donor countries for debt service...
...Failures in Aid FROM AID TO RE-COLONIZATION: LESSONS OF A FAILURE, by Tibor Mende...
...The current power system depends not only on the vested interests of the "northern" nations but also on the willingness of the ruling groups in the "southern" states to go along with the system and in many respects to strengthen it...
...They tend to ignore the vitally important agricultural sector...
...Even more devastating are the statistics concerning foreign aid...
...Estimates indicate that more than ninety per cent of the Asian students who arrive for training in the United States never return to their home countries...
...This domination is no longer expressed by direct control but rather by more subtle means of balance of payments, foreign aid policies, and other indirect but nevertheless effective means...
...And the key to the solution lies in the resolve of the underdeveloped nations to think through answers and act decisively on them...
...Indeed, economic "development" in almost all of the non-Communist developing areas has actually increased the gulf in terms of income, education, and other variables between the small middle class and the masses of the peasants...
...Mende is most effective at describing the status quo and cataloging how it inexorably works against the interests of the underdeveloped nations and places them at an ever-growing disadvantage...
...Fully one-fourth of the interns and residents in American hospitals—11,000 out of a total of 41,000 — received their medical training outside the United States...
...One of the key culprits of the aid relationship is the urbanized educated class of the underdeveloped nations...
...While Mende's arguments are aimed largely at the Western capitalist powers, the Soviet Union has used its position as a "northern" power for its advantage as well...
...They demand costly imported items which eat up valuable foreign exchange...
...All this means that the underdeveloped countries are subsidizing the advanced nations by providing costly years of education to qualified technical manpower only to have the technicians emigrate...
...It is estimated that debt-service eats up a quarter to a third of the earnings on exports of the underdeveloped nations...
...From Aid to Re-Colonization is a powerful denunciation of the "system" of political, intellectual, and economic relationships which exist between the "advanced" and the "developing" nations...
...They press for import-substitution industries capable of producing automobiles, air conditioners, and other items which are costly and have little relevance for basic development tasks...
...The thesis of Tibor Mende's volume is that the achievement of formal "independence" by the nations of the "Third World" has been, to a substantial degree, meaningless...
...While the so-called new nations now have flags and even airlines and universities which they can call their own, the continuing domination of the former colonial powers (plus the United States and to a much lesser degree the Soviet Union) is still a primary fact of life...
...The advanced countries encourage this "brain drain" by their immigration policies...
...From Aid to Re-Colonization is a catalog of horrors, and it makes painful reading for anyone concerned with the welfare of the developing areas...
Vol. 38 • March 1974 • No. 3
