First World, Third World

After half a century of international aid more than a billion people still live in abject poverty. The world development effort can claim only limited success, and in some parts of the world, especially Africa, failure must be recognised. William Ryrie, while starting from a position of sympathy with the aims of the aid effort, insists that the record must be analysed with ruthless honesty. Well-intentioned aid has often had perverse and harmful effects.

One of these has been to undermine the working of the market economy, which offers the best hope of rapid growth and declining poverty. Ryrie argues that a new intellectual basis for aid must be formulated urgently. His book proposes a new approach to the development task which would reconcile it with the market philosophy of the 1990s.