Lant Pritchett points out that giving foreign aid in targeted ways to the poor in the poorest countries ends up undermining support for foreign aid. By shifting to harm reduction rather than big structural changes. As he says “when assistance is maximally targeted to the mitigation of harm, the flip side implication is that the elites (or even middle class) will benefit the least” and this limits the political support in these countries. The aid, while not hurting the poor, ends up being less politically useful and support for it dries up. Ultimately, the programs are scaled back. As he adds: "Politicians love win-win situations as much as the rest of us; in an ideal world, foreign aid would bring in both soft power and at least some dollars into the national economy.  Historically, there was an easy answer to this. Foreign assistance that focused on economic growth raised the exports of the donor countries and hence created jobs in two way". As such, the new "approach" of harms-targetting "does not claim to promote economic growth and hence cannot claim to be instrumental in promoting donor country exports. Though there are private sector firms (both nonprofit and for-profit) that implement projects and this creates some jobs, these firms are small and are essentially clients of the assistance agency and hence bring little or no additional power to the politics of aid". It is thus unsurprising that aid agencies and funding are scaled back. This is a public choice defense of more traditional structural development aid as opposed to the wave of more technocratic and narrowly defined measures. But its also my point about why you need to "buy" good policies from venal politicians. As usual, Lant breaks things. That is why we should love him. indevelopmentmag.com/the-dea…