HodgBlog

Today I was thinking about my previous posts on Foreign Aid. I realized that I have been basing my articles on total foreign aid, rather than strictly humanitarian aid, because the numbers I got from the USAID web site include military aid, aid used to fight drug traffic, and other items that do not fall under the category of humanitarian aid. So, I went back to the USAID web site, and downloaded numbers for aid from the USDA (agricultural aid), aid from USAID (mostly humanitarian), aid from the Peace Corps, refugee and migration aid, and Global AIDS Initiative aid. However, my conclusions are substantially the same, because for the most part, countries’ rank in humanitarian aid is similar to their rank in total aid. There are a couple of exceptions — notably, the first three countries in per capita total aid (Marshall Islands, Palau, and Micronesia) are not ranked highly in humanitarian aid (which is to say, they are getting mostly military aid from the US). But apart from that, my previous conclusions hold: even if we consider only humanitarian aid, our decisions on where to send it are based on something other than humanitarian need.

Here is a new spreadsheet, so you can see for yourself…