Why do foreign aid programs succeeded in some countries and failed in many countries? What should do governments and societies from donor countries to make foreign programs work?

Abstract

In recent years, abundant literature has been released to determine whether or not foreign aid was useful and efficient in eradicating poverty and promoting economic growth in developing countries. Indeed, in the last few decades, the amount of foreign aid provided from developed countries to developing ones has been rocketing. On the contrary, this move has not met with a significant decrease in the number of poor people. The analysis of this issue is even further complicated given the variety of results obtained with foreign aid. There has been no doubt that the provision of aid has been successful in some cases such as the success of the Marshall plan in the 1940s that helped the European countries to recover from the World War crisis and allowed a quick and complete claw-back within 10 years is a case in point. On the other hand, there are plenty of examples of unsuccessful use of foreign aid where huge amounts of foreign aid have proved useless in alleviating poverty and promoting the economic growth of a country.