Allister Heath, who is always worth reading, has an excellent critique of the Make Poverty Permanent/Live8 crowd:

The real question is: why are some countries rich and others poor? To the Make Poverty History crowd, the answer to this question, by far the most important in economics and all of the social sciences, usually lies with Western exploitation, insufficient aid and the alleged ravages caused by free trade or greedy multinationals. This conveniently omits to explain how so many poor nations in Asia have got rich; and many economists in developing countries no longer agree.

...Geldof and all those marching in Edinburgh could start by reading a report out this weekend from the International Policy Network. Its author, Moeletsi Mbeki, happens to be the brother of South Africas president, Thabo Mbeki, as well as an entrepreneur and political analyst. Mbeki argues that since the end of colonialism, most countries in Africa have been exploited by predatory national political elites who see the state as a means to acquire personal wealth through taxation and regulation.

The history of Africa since the 1960s is the history of groups of elites seeking the political kingdom with the primary purpose of enriching themselves, Mbeki says. To rectify this situation, he believes that Africas poorest people must be empowered through the institutions of the free society: property rights and markets: It is necessary that peasants who constitute the core of the private sector in sub-Saharan Africa become the real owners of their primary asset: land. To enable such ownership, freehold must be introduced and the so-called communal land tenure system, which is really state ownership of land, ought to be abolished.

...In a devastating report from the International Monetary Fund last week, Cristina Arellano, Ale Bul, Timothy Lane and Leslie Lipschitz found that greater aid actually tended to reduce a countrys export performance and the production of goods for exports. The paper also found that aid was usually used to fund consumption rather than investment.

...Between 1980 and 2003, more than $116bn (in 2002 dollars) in US development assistance alone went to 89 poor countries. Yet these recipients often experienced poor even negative per capita economic growth, says Brett Schaeffer, of the Heritage Foundation. Of these 89 countries, 37 experienced negative real annual compound growth in per capita GDP, 20 experienced minimal growth of 1% or less, and only 32 experienced growth of more than 1%. Half of these recipients in sub-Saharan Africa saw a real decline in GDP per capita.

Do read the whole thing.