Myths about foreign aid can be, as this insightful article points out, valuable tools of statecraft. But they can also help obscure inconvenient truths about financial flows and who gains from them. As the writer almost certainly knows, the Americans applied their Marshall largesse crucially to offset substantial (and probably larger) amounts of money flowing across the Atlantic in the opposite direction: capital flight from Europe. Given the persistence today of poor-to-rich flows (licit and illicit), the mythologies and optical illusions at work around foreign aid these days appear to work in ways not so different from those surrounding Marshall aid.
Myths about foreign aid can be, as this insightful article points out, valuable tools of statecraft. But they can also help obscure inconvenient truths about financial flows and who gains from them. As the writer almost certainly knows, the Americans applied their Marshall largesse crucially to offset substantial (and probably larger) amounts of money flowing across the Atlantic in the opposite direction: capital flight from Europe. Given the persistence today of poor-to-rich flows (licit and illicit), the mythologies and optical illusions at work around foreign aid these days appear to work in ways not so different from those surrounding Marshall aid.