Throughout this book, I have argued that having a good economic policy primarily determines the economic growth of countries. I have defined the conceptual outlines of this good economic policy and I have examined the manner in which globalization, an unavoidable phenomenon imposed on all today, affects economic policy. To complete the subject, it is now left for me to examine the role of foreign aid. Everybody today will admit that aid exerts, and will continue to exert for some time, considerable influence on the economic policy of African countries.

The debate posed by international aid is twofold: that of its priorities – that is, what it should seek to do, what problems it has to solve or what goals it must pursue – and that of its mode of delivery or how aid funds should be made available to recipient countries. I will attempt to answer these two questions in Part Four. We begin by examining the trends that stem from recent developments of foreign aid (Chapter 11). The following chapter, Chapter 12, opens the debate on what foreign aid must seek to do to be effective and contribute to economic policy, while Chapter 13 examines the modes of delivery.