Economies of international development

Maia Green

Chapter 2 in Elgar Encyclopedia of Economic Anthropology, 2025, pp 180-185 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: International development is a multi-billion-dollar industry legitimated through political ideologies and economic theories. Governments, multi-lateral agencies and private organizations claim their resource transfers at scale catalyze structural transformation in national economies. A multiplicity of programs and projects aim to bring about directed changes in the lives of beneficiaries. Development transfers bring substantial resource flows to recipient governments and the contractors tasked with program implementation, creating opportunities for capital acquisition for the professional elites affiliated with the sector. In many low-income countries, where land and labor are relatively cheap, development capital facilitates the accumulation strategies of elites and middle-level bureaucrats, sustaining emerging architectures of inequality. Anthropology's analytical concern with development-as-failure, or with local contexts, obscures the ways that foreign aid impacts on economic relations beyond the project framing of targeted beneficiaries. International development is an economy and system of social organization.

Keywords: International development; Foreign aid; Aid economies-inequality- projects; Tanzania (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035312566
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