Yesterday UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that in order to fund increased defence spending, the international aid budget will be cut from 0.5% of gross national income to 0.3% in 2027. This follows a cut in November 2020 which reduced the level from 0.7% to 0.5%
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It's interesting to think of this as a humanitarian arms race in reverse, competition to contribute to international aid has just experienced a massive "disarmament" in the US, allowing the UK "disarm" too. It could also be that Starmer is hoping to placate or disrupt reactionary movements as they inevitably rise in the UK. Ian Bremmer points out that the Europe lags behind the US in terms of these movements.
But it's all very depressing.
Is it really the case that the UK and US were competing for the gains to reputation that foreign aid brings? I suppose I’d try to answer that question by looking at the history of where the 0.7% target, which I thought was fairly broadly shared among rich countries, originally came from. One history I found said:
> It results from the 1970 United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2626. The 0.7% figure was calculated as a means to boost growth for developing countries. Since 1970, however, only several Nordic countries have met or surpassed this target.
Which makes it look like a potential failed case of cooperation: that no country wants to have the whole cost of international aid fall just on itself, so they try to establish international agreements so that others contribute too. Is that the right model, though? Perhaps countries don’t really experience pressure to adjust their contribution upwards when other countries drop out, and are happy to just continue doing the amount they were doing. I can think of a possible dynamic where ‘preventing bad runaway spillover effects like the spread of war and pandemics’ costs X billion dollars of aid (and has a threshold effect, where providing half of X billion is much less than half as effective as X), which no individual country is willing to stump up, but which is important to every rich country’s interest. In that dynamic, rich countries benefit from such UN-induced cooperation, by spreading the burden and getting the benefits of less instability and disease in the world.
If that’s the dynamic, then your idea of a race to the bottom in aid (a dis-‘alm’-ament, you could say) would not necessarily be what you expect after some country drops out — they’d possibly want to raise their contributions to make up the difference and still be able to reach the threshold of X. Alternatively, the UK now might expect that without the US it will be too difficult to reach that hypothetical threshold, and so there’s no point trying any more.
But if the incentives / dynamic of foreign aid is more about getting prestige for your country, then you could see a broad disalmament when the total pool of funding takes a hit — or alternatively you could see the second or third place players boosting their contribution to try and take the lead. So I’m not sure what determines what one would expect to see given this potential reputation-based dynamic.
Curated and popular this week
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Note: I am not a malaria expert. This is my best-faith attempt at answering a question that was bothering me, but this field is a large and complex field, and I’ve almost certainly misunderstood something somewhere along the way.
Summary
While the world made incredible progress in reducing malaria cases from 2000 to 2015, the past 10 years have seen malaria cases stop declining and start rising. I investigated potential reasons behind this increase through reading the existing literature and looking at publicly available data, and I identified three key factors explaining the rise:
1. Population Growth: Africa's population has increased by approximately 75% since 2000. This alone explains most of the increase in absolute case numbers, while cases per capita have remained relatively flat since 2015.
2. Stagnant Funding: After rapid growth starting in 2000, funding for malaria prevention plateaued around 2010.
3. Insecticide Resistance: Mosquitoes have become increasingly resistant to the insecticides used in bednets over the past 20 years. This has made older models of bednets less effective, although they still have some effect. Newer models of bednets developed in response to insecticide resistance are more effective but still not widely deployed.
I very crudely estimate that without any of these factors, there would be 55% fewer malaria cases in the world than what we see today. I think all three of these factors are roughly equally important in explaining the difference.
Alternative explanations like removal of PFAS, climate change, or invasive mosquito species don't appear to be major contributors.
Overall this investigation made me more convinced that bednets are an effective global health intervention.
Introduction
In 2015, malaria rates were down, and EAs were celebrating. Giving What We Can posted this incredible gif showing the decrease in malaria cases across Africa since 2000:
Giving What We Can said that
> The reduction in malaria has be
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> How the dismal science can help us end the dismal treatment of farm animals
By Martin Gould
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Note: This post was crossposted from the Open Philanthropy Farm Animal Welfare Research Newsletter by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post.
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This year we’ll be sharing a few notes from my colleagues on their areas of expertise. The first is from Martin. I’ll be back next month. - Lewis
In 2024, Denmark announced plans to introduce the world’s first carbon tax on cow, sheep, and pig farming. Climate advocates celebrated, but animal advocates should be much more cautious. When Denmark’s Aarhus municipality tested a similar tax in 2022, beef purchases dropped by 40% while demand for chicken and pork increased.
Beef is the most emissions-intensive meat, so carbon taxes hit it hardest — and Denmark’s policies don’t even cover chicken or fish. When the price of beef rises, consumers mostly shift to other meats like chicken. And replacing beef with chicken means more animals suffer in worse conditions — about 190 chickens are needed to match the meat from one cow, and chickens are raised in much worse conditions.
It may be possible to design carbon taxes which avoid this outcome; a recent paper argues that a broad carbon tax would reduce all meat production (although it omits impacts on egg or dairy production). But with cows ten times more emissions-intensive than chicken per kilogram of meat, other governments may follow Denmark’s lead — focusing taxes on the highest emitters while ignoring the welfare implications.
Beef is easily the most emissions-intensive meat, but also requires the fewest animals for a given amount. The graph shows climate emissions per tonne of meat on the right-hand side, and the number of animals needed to produce a kilogram of meat on the left. The fish “lives lost” number varies significantly by
It's interesting to think of this as a humanitarian arms race in reverse, competition to contribute to international aid has just experienced a massive "disarmament" in the US, allowing the UK "disarm" too. It could also be that Starmer is hoping to placate or disrupt reactionary movements as they inevitably rise in the UK. Ian Bremmer points out that the Europe lags behind the US in terms of these movements.
But it's all very depressing.
Is it really the case that the UK and US were competing for the gains to reputation that foreign aid brings? I suppose I’d try to answer that question by looking at the history of where the 0.7% target, which I thought was fairly broadly shared among rich countries, originally came from. One history I found said:
> It results from the 1970 United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2626. The 0.7% figure was calculated as a means to boost growth for developing countries. Since 1970, however, only several Nordic countries have met or surpassed this target.... (read more)