William Easterly Quotes
Remember, aid cannot achieve the end of poverty. Only homegrown development base on the dynamism of individuals and firms in free markets can do that.
Easterly, William. The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. Penguin Press, 2006, p. 381.
Although the Premier recognizes the importance of environmental protection it is difficult for China and other developing countries to make the necessary trade off’s at the expense of slower growth which means continued poverty. Even in the United States with all its affluence, slowing economic growth for environmental reasons is politically very difficult.
The International Finance Corporation (IFC), an organization supposedly devoted to financing poverty elimination had supported the building of a luxury 5-Star hotels in Ghana, Egypt and several other poor nations. The construction creates jobs as does the operation of the hotel, but critics complain that the impact on poverty is small compared to the size of the investment. The fancy hotels are too expensive for the local small businessmen and women to use in their commercial development. The elites and the AID givers and NGOs of course have better—and more expensive—accommodations.
What is also neglected very often is that America and the other developed nations exploited and destroyed much of their own environment in the process of developing yet they express concern that the lesser developed nations will do what they do.
William Russell Easterly is an American economist, specializing in economic development. He is a Professor of Economics at New York University, joint with Africa House, and Co-Director of NYU’s Development Research Institute. He is a Research Associate of NBER, senior fellow at the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD) of Duke University, and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC. Easterly is an associate editor of the Journal of Economic Growth.
