This news is very disturbing:
Jashuli Bista, 26, who was living an impoverished life in Sunkada VDC of the district on Friday, killed her daughters, four-year-old Ramkala and eight-month-old Ramita, before she hanged herself to death.
Bista had been raising her daughters all alone as her husband Min Bahadur Bishta had gone to India for work.
This story is also very troubling. A woman is stripped naked and beaten up by a group of stupid men in the middle of Kathmandu.
Sachs has finally responded to Dambisa Moyo’s new book Dead Aid, where she basically follows on Easterly’s line of argument that aid is hurting Africa more than it is helping them.
The debate about foreign aid has become farcical. The big opponents of aid today are Dambisa Moyo, an African-born economist who reportedly received scholarships so that she could go to Harvard and Oxford but sees nothing wrong with denying $10 in aid to an African child for an anti-malaria bed net. Her colleague in opposing aid, Bill Easterly, received large-scale government support from the National Science Foundation for his own graduate training.
I certainly don't begrudge any of them the help that they got. Far from it. I believe in this kind of help. And I'd find Moyo's views cruel and mistaken even she did not get the scholarships that have been reported (Easterly mentioned his receipt of NSF support in the same book in which he denounces aid). I begrudge them trying to pull up the ladder for those still left behind. Before peddling their simplistic concoction of free markets and self-help, they and we should think about the realities of life, in which all of us need help at some time or other and in countless ways, and even more importantly we should think about the life-and-death consequences for impoverished people who are denied that help.
Recently Paul Kagame, President of Rwanda, wrote an op-ed for the Financial Times praising Moyo's fresh thinking. This is extraordinary. His government has depended on aid for more than a decade. Nearly half the budget revenues currently come from aid. Rwanda currently imports around $800 million of merchandise each year, but only earns $250 million or so in exports. So how does it do it? Aid, of course, helped to pay for around $450 million of the imports. Without foreign aid, Rwanda's pathbreaking public health successes and strong current economic growth would collapse. Kagame's op-ed did not help FT readers to understand this.
At some level, the works of Sachs and Easterly (and Moyo) are more ideological than practical (I think Sachs is little bit more practical!). Easterly is in an all out war with economists who favor some form of government intervention and industrial policy (such as Sachs, Rodrik, and Collier). Easterly’s work is more in line with Hayek’s and free-market views and Sachs’ is more interventionist. These two are reviving the 1940’s back-and-forth argument between Hayek and Keynes (and later followed by Hayek and Samuelson) and applying them in the development field. And now we know who was right in the epic ideological battle between the centrists and the rightists.