Dead Aid

Not long ago I went to a presentation of the book "Dead Aid: How Aid is Not Working and How there is Another Way for Africa", by Dambisa Moyo, at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS), and I have subsequently read the book.
If I had not been at the presentation, I would probably have rated the book lower; at the start of her presentation, Ms. Moyo said that the book was not an academic analysis, but was rather intended to create debate. With this in mind, the book is surely worth reading, since the debate on aid to poor countries is in much need of reflection and new ideas.
That said, this is not such a great book, and its message is not new. In fact, the best thing about the book is its quite provocative premise that Ms. Moyo largely views aid as the cause of all of Africa's problems.

The first part of the book is a fine albeit superficial summary of the history of aid, and its problems in relation to Africa, where she argues that aid to Africa since the end of colonial times has been the major cause for increased poverty, lack of growth, corruption and bad governance, even conflict! This of course leads to the more or less explicit premise that aid should just be done away with (something that the book has been widely quoted for), but in selected parts of the book, you can see that she is not necessarily as extreme as she gives the impression of in that first part: "However worthwhile the goal to reduce and even eliminate aid is, it would not be practical or realistic to see aid immediately drop to zero. Nor, in the interim, it might be desireable." (page 76).
The main problem with the first part of the book is her lack of differetiating between different kinds of aid; she does a simplistic differentiation in the start of the book between humanitarian and NGO aid (regarding the latter, Ms. Moyo said at DIIS that she would write another book, where I would nevertheless expect the overall message to be the same), and there is a big problem in this if a person knows more about aid: issues like how it is provided and to whom, as well as the timeframe (a huge problem she rightly points out), are only implicitly treated, and these are quite relevant discussions in the aid debate, where the discussion between budget-support or project-aid is widely discussed. Also here, it is a pity that while she (competently) talks about the ECONOMY of aid, she barely talks about the POLITICS of aid, which I would argue is the main cause of many of the problems of aid: let us not be naïve to think that Western donors provide aid largely for altruistic reasons!

The second part of the book has Ms. Moyo's recommendations about what should be done to develop Africa, and is quite relevant, but very poor in the sense that there is nothing really new in it; in fact, Ms. Moyo largely repeats a market-oriented liberal approach to economic development: development of SME's, capital markets for investment, free trade and fair and just laws on property and banking. I think many existing development economists will have difficulty not agreeing with her.
Knowing this now, I find it disappointing that at the debate at DIIS there was no more discussion when one of the panelists, Erik S. Reinert, implicitly criticised Ms. Moyo's neo-liberal approach by arguing that Africa needed to develop like the west had done: by nurturing its infant industries through state protectionism and investment.
Although well-informed, and Ms. Moyo clearly being a good intellectual, the book is a disappointment for anyone wanting a more in-depth analysis (and may I add here how annoyed I was that some of her endnotes referred to Wikipedia). Although Ms. Moyo refers to some of the development thinkers that have said similar things such as William Easterly or Paul Collier, she uses them only selectively, when in fact William Easterly has already said much of what she says (and more eloquently) and Paul Collier has given a criticism of many of the weaknesses she mentions about aid, but argues that the main problem is that aid DOES WORK when provided under specific conditions.
One can only have the feeling that Ms. Moyo generalizes as much as any European about a continent of 54 countries and one billion people.

While I would say that this book is very good for reflection and discussion, it should NEVER BE READ ALONE, but should be supplemented by some of the more in-depth books on the subject, as for instance William Easterly's White Man's Burden, for someone who largely agrees with Ms. Moyo, or Jeffrey Sachs' The End of Poverty, for someone who argues that aid can solve all problems, as well as Paul Collier's The Bottom Billion, which has a much more balanced view on aid than any of these, including Ms. Moyo herself.