Future of foreign assistance : a summary of issues and annotated bibliography

foreign assistance - including major reports prepared by the A.I.D. Administrator, the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and other key agencies and interest groups - are the subject of this annotated bibliography. The bibliography is arranged in three parts, focusing on, respectively: (1) the future of foreign assistance programs, organizations, and legislation; (2) changing Third World conditions that these foreign assistance programs must address; and (3) particular substantive areas (agriculture and rural development, social services, and technology transfer). An introduction briefly analyzes the issues raised in the documents and points out areas of agreement and disagreement. Overall, the documents reveal the emergence of a broad consensus that U.S. foreign assistance needs re-thinking. This consensus rests first of all on common recognition of development trends - the increasing diversity of developing countries, the growing importance of economic interdependence over economic dependence and aid, the relative insignificance of official foreign assistance compared to other economic relationships, the long-term nature of economic development, the relative importance of policy and institutional changes over project interventions, the transnational nature of many development issues (e.g., debt, drugs), and the ability of markets to allocate development resources more efficiently than governments. The documents also share common perceptions of the internal problems facing U.S. foreign assistance - an obsolete Foreign Assistance Act, an ambiguous mixing of goals (military, political, humanitarian, and development), a weak constituency, emphasis on planning and monitoring over results and on short-term performance over sustainable growth, excessive rigidity, Congressional micromanagement, overreliance on the public sector, weak inter-donor coordination, and the declining size of U.S. foreign assistance relative both to developing world economies and contributions from other donors. Despite these commonalities, the reports differed in important respects, especially regarding the structure and role of a new or revamped foreign assistance agency, the strategic emphasis of foreign assistance (e.g., whether to emphasize poverty alleviation or economic growth, whether to accept the social costs of structural adjustment as unavoidable or seek to alleviate them) and the priority sectors and countries for foreign assistance.