I linked the other day to a TIME blurb about the new book Dead Aid, which questions popular assumptions about the value of foreign economic development aid, echoing the concerns William Easterly shared during his recent Pope Lecture at N.C. State.

Newsweek also includes a short feature this week about the new book from Dambisa Moyo, a Zambian economist:

“Dead Aid”?a tiny volume, forcefully written?insists that foreign
aid (a trillion dollars over the past 60 years) is a waste: it’s bad
for Africa,
she says?and for Africans. Aid, Moyo argues, keeps Africa in a
supplicant’s role when its governments need to become self-sufficient.
She recommends shutting off all foreign aid to African [sic] within 10 years.

Moyo
believes this dependency relationship is perpetuated by Western
governments and glorified by the celebrities who have made Africa their
cause du jour. The book takes special aim at the rock star Bono,
who has become the world’s most prominent spokesperson for the people
of Africa. “The problem that Africa is really suffering from,” she told
me, “is negative PR. If there is a criticism I would level against
celebrities?they have tended to perpetuate negative stereotypes. They
always tend to portray Africa as a horrendous basket case. They want to
portray the war, the poverty, the disease, the corruption. As an
African, I’m tired of it.” Doesn’t a photograph of a celebrity with an
impoverished child raise the world’s consciousness? Moyo says no.
“Taking a picture with a starving African child?that doesn’t help me
raise an African child to believe she can be an engineer or a doctor.”
Instead of aid, Moyo recommends other paths to financial and democratic
independence: bond issues, trade, foreign investment.