Demagogue

I don't think anyone has covered himself in glory in the controversy over whether the U.S. is sufficiently generous to victims of the tsunami. As Frederick (I believe) noted on the "old" Demagogue, the uber-patriot bloc has sometimes mischaracterized the nature of international criticism. People on all sides of the debate have used statistics to obfuscate rather than enlighten (shocking, isn't it).

In particular, people almost always ignore the complexity of evaluating and comparing different countries' responses. Just to begin with, there's the question of what "counts" toward a country's total. Does private charity count? Does aid given to the affected countries but taken away from the donor's general foreign aid budget count, or just "new" money? What categories qualify--immediate food and medical aid, surely, but what about longer-term pledges of support to rebuild damaged infrastructure or even military aid? Given Dubya's penchant for announcing grand plans and then failing actually to appropriate the money he's promised (NYC after 9/11, AIDS in Africa), how seriously can we take relatively vague pledges of future money? And then you get into what metric to use: gross dollar amount; per capita (of the donor country) amount; percentage of GDP? Even this gets complicated. A poor country has to dig deeper to give the same percentage of GDP as a rich country; just as poor families spend a higher proportion of their income on necessities like food and housing, poor countries have less "discretionary spending" relative to their GDPs than do rich countries.

The upshot is that while I think a discussion about the U.S.'s foreign aid policy is generally worth having, most assertions that I've seen from officials, advocates, and pundits about how much we give and how we compare to others have not usefully advanced the discussion. I still have no idea what metric Colin Powell was using when the U.S. initially offered $15 million and he defended us by saying we are more generous than any other country or group of countries in the world.

In that spirit, I bring you a handful of facts about the Cloggies amongst whom I live, inspired by the remarks of the Dutch Minister of Overseas Development yesterday. (I'm not sure how much significance should be attached to the fact that the Dutch have an Overseas Development Minister; they've got many more junior ministers than we have cabinet secretaries, so you really can't say that they've made overseas development a cabinet-level priority).

The minister announced a massive increase in Dutch aid to the affected countries, bringing the Netherlands' total to something like $315 million at current exchange rates. To put that in some context:

• The Dutch population is roughly 16.3 million, or less than that of Florida. The U.S. population is more than 280 million. The Dutch government, then, has pledged close to 20 bucks per citizen; to keep up in the per capita sweepstakes, the U.S. would have to pony up around $5.4 billion. I'm not sure how the numbers come out if you include resident non-citizens in each country, or taxpayers in each country.
• The Dutch GDP (pdf) in 2003 was a little under $513 billion. The U.S. GDP that year was just short of $11 trillion, or more than 20 times as much (this is using 2005 exchange rates; if I used 2003 rates, then the gap would be even larger). Those of you who are good with numbers will already have done some rough calculations in your head and figured out that Dutch per-capita GDP is also lower than that in the U.S; the OECD puts the U.S. in the "high income" category based on per-capita GDP at purchasing power parity exchange rates, while the Netherlands is merely "high middle income." The Netherlands has pledged .06% (that's .0006) of its 2003 GDP; the same fraction of the U.S. 2003 GDP is approximately $6.6 billion.
• Regarding the argument that the U.S. has a relatively high ratio of private charity to public aid, my numbers are spottier. The umbrella organization set up to funnel donations to people like the Dutch Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders had taken about $145 million as of last Thursday. On a per-capita basis at current exchange rates, that comes out to about $2.5 billion in private U.S. charity; on a percentage-of-GDP basis, the equivalent is roughly $3.1 billion. But presumably there are other routes for giving charity than this umbrella organization, so I've surely understated Dutch private giving, plus which my figures are almost a week old.
• Putting it all together, you can use these calculations to suggest that a U.S. equivalent to the amount of total Dutch giving, public and private, would be something between $8 and 10 billion.

As I said, take these with a grain of salt. The U.S. and the Netherlands are not in the same position. The U.S. has taken on a much larger and more expensive military role in the world, for example. Whether or not you think that's a good thing, it affects how much we can afford to spend on other things. The Dutch welfare state, on the other hand, is more generous than the American one. So do what you want with these numbers.

A parting thought: the focus really should be on overall foreign aid and what our general development policies should be, not on the response to one particular and unusual crisis. In that light, consider the Overseas Development Minister's remarks:

But Van Ardenne also urged other donors not to allow the cost of humanitarian efforts in the tsunami-hit nations to negatively impact efforts in other regions. The minister called on other nations to increase their overseas development budgets.

She said the disaster presented the opportunity to make an international agreement stipulating that nations allocate at least 0.7 percent of their Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to overseas development.

The Netherlands currently allocates 0.8 percent of its GDP to overseas development....

The State Department's budget request for FY 2005 (pdf) asks for a 4.6% cut in foreign assistance, on top of an 11.5% cut last year. Not knowing what the Netherlands counts toward its claimed 0.8% of GDP allocated to overseas development, I can't find a comparable number for what the U.S. is allocating right now. 0.8% of the U.S. GDP in 2003 would be about $88 billion. I've got a very strong feeling that we'd have to cook the numbers pretty hard to get there; the "foreign assistance" request in State's budget is for less than $750 million, but presumably there is additional overseas development spending not included in that category.