Does Aid Work? Report to an Intergovernmental Task Force
Does Aid Work? Report to an Intergovernmental Task Force
Synopsis
Excerpt
A great deal has happened in debate and discussion of the role of foreign aid since we first wrote; new subjects and new views of old subjects have swum into greater prominence, and it was thought worthwhile to depict this in a new edition.
Does Aid Work? has already gone into two impressions and been translated into German and Japanese. the present edition fully updates the original version. It has pruned some of the more technical parts, for which the interested reader should consult the first edition, and is somewhat reduced in overall length. It also contains discussion of aid experience and related literature which has appeared over the last six years, and an expanded bibliography.
I wish to correct one impression which appeared in several of the book's reviews: Does Aid Work? was not commissioned by the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund, but by an international Task Force comprising a number of governments belonging to those two institutions. the preface to the first edition conveyed this with some precision, but the niceties appear to have escaped the reviewers in question.
Finally, I should add that my colleagues who assisted in the writing of the first edition have not been involved in preparing the present one. But I remain indebted to them for the intellectual stimulus and cooperation which made the original volume possible.
Professor R. H. Cassen International Development Centre Queen Elizabeth House University of Oxford
July 1993 . . .