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.
And possibly the proposed cuts to the US defense budget, which I mention because those proposed cuts may be more likely to outlive Trump than the NATO stuff. (Maybe I am projecting because, as a US taxpayer, I have long felt that the US spends too much on defense.)