Our great foreign wastage
WOrlD Bank president Jim Yong Kim has made a point of being a frequent visitor to london and the Department for international Development in recognition of Britain’s foreign aid commitment.
The UK is the only Group of seven leading industrial nations to meet the Un’s 0.7pc target of national wealth.
This sum has increased rapidly in cash terms as the British economy has continued to expand.
so we shouldn’t be in the least bit surprised that asian-american Kim, who hails from a family of north Korean refugees, chose to use the annual meetings of the imF and World Bank to try to rally support behind foreign aid.
He sees all bets are off now David Cameron, who saw the aid budget as a way of eliminating the Tories’ reputation as the nasty party, is out of the picture.
Clearly, there have been notorious abuses of the way funds have been used. in political terms it is impossible to justify UK taxpayers’ money being squandered by the Palestinian authority to fund the upkeep of the families of terrorists in israeli jails.
more frivolously, the now suspended pro- vision of £5m to ‘ethiopian spice Girls’ was beyond parody. similarly, it is intolerable that so much money funnelled to poor countries ended up in Panama and at HsBC’s branch in Geneva.
such wholesale wastage, at a time of budget cuts in the UK, undermined the moral and ethical case.
We should also be aware that amid the £700bn or so that the British government spends each year, trimming the £13bn foreign aid budget only goes so far. Opponents of aid have spent it on all manner of causes from the nHs, to social care and defence.
Kim no doubt can expect huge opprobrium for weighing into such a sensitive UK domestic arena.
Yet we know from generous British public responses to crises that not all citizens resent spending money on african poverty.
The worse it gets in africa and the middle east the harder it will be to stem the migration tide.
Retail wilderness
mUCH was made during the american election campaign, and since, of the loss of manufacturing jobs.
indeed, Donald Trump is thinking of using a long-forgotten trade measure, dating back to 1962 long before the World Trade Organisation was up and running, to keep steel imports out of the Us.
manufacturing fled america long ago and all the White House can do is twiddle the dials to look as if it is doing something. The big change, as in Britain, is the switch from the physical economy to the digital economy which is tearing down chunks of the services sector.
shopping malls have become zombie malls replaced by giant warehouse sheds.
america’s department store chains are shrinking rapidly. macy’s may still sponsor holiday parades down Fifth avenue in new York but it is firing 10,000 employees.
sears stands on the verge of Chapter 11 bankruptcy and here in Washington there are as many stores boarded up in the fashionable shopping area of Georgetown as there are operating. Fashion giant ralph lauren has left Fifth avenue.
Us stores employ a third fewer staff than they did at the start of the noughties – 18 times the number of jobs lost in coal mining, which Trump promised to restore.
newspapers across the Us have been decimated with the loss of 270,000 jobs, or twothirds of the workforce.
What is required is not a return to oldtime manufacturing but a bolstering of iT and robotic skills for shops of the future.
There also needs to be a recognition, as pointed out by lord simon Wolfson of next, that we all have enough things.
millennials prefer to spend their money on cafes, restaurants and holiday travel.
it doesn’t make big retail an attractive investment prospect.
Frexit silence
aT lasT year’s spring meetings of the imF and the World Bank it was hard to stop imF chief Christine lagarde waffling on about Brexit in contravention of the Fund’s usually neutral political role.
at her annual press conference yesterday not a word was heard about the populist shift in France and the dangers of Frexit.
she was returning to a convention that imF officials don’t interfere in politics, especially their own country’s. Funny that.