Economic Aid: an Obsession with Efficiency

Mohammed H. Malek
Additional contact information
Mohammed H. Malek: University of St. Andrews, Scotland

Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics, 1988, vol. 2, issue 4, 259-270

Abstract: The issue of aid efficiency has been the main preoccupation of the policy makers, politicians and researchers in the donor countries during the 1980s. This paper argues that a unique and neutral concept of ‘aid efficiency’ is a rare genus. There are fundamental conceptual and methodological difficulties involved and the so called ‘neutral’ criteria are ultimately dependent on the subjective judgements of the evaluators. This would suggest that ‘economic efficiency’ as a criterion for donation or curtailment of aid is neither necessary nor sufficient. Moral, social, altruistic or purely egoistic motives are more honest and at least as good as any ‘economic’ measure which claims to be value-free.

Date: 1988
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://jie.sagepub.com/content/2/4/259.abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:jinter:v:2:y:1988:i:4:p:259-270

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().