Aid and Dependence: Issues for Recipients

So much has been written in the last decade or so on aid and development—their interrelationship, their measurement, their objectives, optimal policies, etc.—that one may at first despair of saying anything new on the subject. Yet, in looking over the field and considering the welter of views, frequently mutually contradictory, which have already been expressed, one cannot but be struck by the disproportionate share of the discussion which has been accounted for by analysis from the developed countries. In the introduction to a recent best-seller describing American history from the viewpoint of the North American Indian the point is made that the history of the white man’s westward expansion across the continent had previously always been presented from the perspective of a man looking westward. (Brown, 1971, xii) In the same spirit, it is necessary to consider the question of aid and development from the perspective of the man looking ‘northward.’ More than enough analyses have already been presented from a ‘southward’ looking perspective by apologists for the present international system, consultants to aid agencies, liberal reformers and radicals in the ‘north.’