Foreign Aid in the New Global Economy

by Peter Burnell (Editor)

Aid is one of the major issues in development and international relations. Over the last 50 years there have been remarkable changes in our understanding of aid's limits and potentialities as an instrument of economic, social and political change. This important collection brings together major landmark contributions to the analysis, structured around key issues and debates and offers an overview of present understanding. Aid's role in the new global political economy is under intense scrutiny, as analysts, politicians and civil society struggle to reach a consensus on such issues as how much and what kinds of aid to support, to which countries to allocate aid and under what conditions. Equally accessible to economists and non-economists, Foreign Aid in the New Global Economy provides an invaluable reference for anyone with a policy interest in aid, its consequences for international development and the theoretical underpinnings.

656 pages, Hardcover

First published September 4, 2004

About the author

Peter Burnell is a Professor in the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick. He was educated at the University of Bristol and University of Warwick. His long established research interests are in democratization, the political economy of foreign aid, and politics and policy in Zambia, in total comprising eleven books including three single-authored monographs, over thirty articles in refereed journals and many chapters in edited collections. He is a founding editor of the international journal Democratization. A present research focus is a critical examination of how standard conceptions of democracy are being diffused globally through networks of democracy promotion actors based mainly in the West. Another examines the political drivers of international assistance to developing regions against a backdrop of competing, sometimes contradictory policy objectives and theories of economic, social and political change.