Political Economy of Additional Development Finance

The world needs more ‘development finance’ in order to facilitate faster growth in the economies of low- and middle-income countries, and for attending to the shorter-term basic material-welfare needs of poor people in poor countries. There are many purposes counting as urgent from a humanitarian point of view that depend on extra funding: vaccination, essential medicines, dehydration doses, clean and accessible water supplies, sewerage, teachers’ pay, teacher training, emergency food stocks, and with all the transport and skills and administrative infrastructure to bring these benefits to fruition. And this is to take no account of the relevance of much of the same infrastructure, or of the immediate welfare benefits themselves, to economic growth and to the increased material capacity that these in turn will bring.