This is the necessary background to the amendment. I repeat what my noble friend Lord MacGregor said: it is not my intention to go over this in the course of subsequent amendments. If it is felt better to take more time in subsequent amendments—if that is the will of the House—I will do so, but that is not my intention. I think it is more coherent, a more efficient use of time and more helpful to the House if the argument is made on this, the first amendment that we are discussing today.
As I say, I know that the noble Countess obviously does not want to hear this, but I am afraid that it is a fact that in the G7 countries, the amount of aid that the other six give ranges from 0.4% in the case of France and Germany to 0.2% in the case of Italy and the United States. None of them has the slightest intention of increasing that, and certainly they have no intention of making it legally binding.
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Another reason why there is a problem with development aid was well set out in a book, Why Nations Fail, which some noble Lords may have read
and which is well worth reading, by a couple of American economists, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, who in American terms are on the liberal side of the aisle. In that book they say:
“The idea that rich Western countries should provide large amounts of ‘developmental aid’ in order to solve the problem of poverty in sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, Central America, and South Asia is based on an incorrect understanding of what causes poverty. Countries such as Afghanistan are poor because of their extractive institutions—which result in lack of property rights, law and order, or well-functioning legal systems and the stifling dominance of national and, more often, local elites over political and economic life … If sustained economic growth depends on inclusive institutions, giving aid to regimes presiding over extractive institutions cannot be the solution”.
That is a very important point—and again, it is a reason why we need the flexibility that is embodied in this amendment.
Incidentally, it may well be that the best thing we can do to create this significant political institutional change in these countries is, instead of spending all this money on so-called development aid, spending rather more money on educating the future leaders of these countries in our best schools and universities in the hope that they will then be able to bring about the political and institutional changes that are required in their countries. That would certainly be of far better use than development aid.
The fact is that no form of public spending should have a guaranteed percentage of GDP or of GNI—not just aid but, as we have said, not even defence.