1. Take up the White Man’s burden –

2. The savage wars of peace –

3. Fill full the mouth of Famine,

4. And bid the sickness cease.

5. – Rudyard Kipling, 1899

Why do countries give foreign aid? Some earnest idealists see aid as a modern form of Kipling’s ‘White Man’s burden’: a worthy, noble enterprise, aimed at lifting those worse off than ourselves out of poverty. More critical observers point to the poem’s call for expansionism and Western control, and condemn aid as simply a modern form of imperialism. Others, still, note that Kipling may have intended his poem as satire, criticizing foolish notions about both the value and the feasibility of assisting those allegedly in need of superior Western beliefs, skills and products; aid, they suggest, is a similarly misguided and often counterproductive policy. There may be kernels of truth in each of these characterizations, but even taken together they offer at best an incomplete picture of the multifaceted policy area that is contemporary foreign aid. Aid programmes can handle whatever policy-makers put their minds to, making them the foreign policy version of a multitool or Swiss army knife.

Every advanced industrialized nation has a foreign aid programme, and each of these programmes officially aims to foster the development of denizens of the poorest countries. The sums involved are considerable. In recent years, annual transfers have exceeded $100 billion, which translates to over $100 per donor state citizen per year. In some donor states the aid programme accounts for 5 per cent or more of the government budget. On the recipient side, official development assistance (ODA) accounts for a large share of international capital flowing into less developed countries (LDCs). Nevertheless, the factors shaping foreign aid remain ill-understood, more than half a century after Morgenthau first described the policy as ‘baffling’. Aid levels rise and fall without obvious causes. Explanatory factors that appear important in one case are insignificant in another. And case studies of different aid programmes frequently explain similar empirical patterns using incompatible models. One of the best recent studies on foreign aid frankly concludes that ‘There are too many interacting variables to justify a model that would be both parsimonious and insightful’.