Making Globalisation Work for the Poor?

For nearly 40 years overseas development has been one of the key territories in which Labour governments in Britain have sought to distinguish themselves from the Conservatives. Actual expenditure on overseas development, including aid, may be only a small part of government spending—less than 1 per cent—but apart from defence it is government’s largest item of spending in the international Ž eld, and potentially a major instrument by which to achieve redistribution on a global scale. We may not have heard much about it during the June 2001 election in Britain, but, when we did, it was to reinforce the message that the Labour Party, contrary to many allegations, has a quite distinct political programme from the Conservatives. These two White Papers aim to repackage the international component of that message for the twenty-Ž rst century. How successfully have they done this? The two White Papers were born of a period of quite serious disillusionmen t with the ability of states—in both North and South—to produce international development. There was a time when it was possible for a US president to urge generosity in the giving of overseas aid ‘not in order to win commercial advantage, not because our political rivals are giving it, but because it is right’, but those days have long gone, not least because the end of the Cold War makes it impossible to buttress aid allocations with national security arguments. As with welfare state systems, the criterion for allocating money is no longer that it is ‘right’, but that it is effective in hitting its target; and the target, latterly, has not been hit: there has been, until very recently, little correlation between aid  ows