James Buchan has reviewed War Games, the new book about the aid industry by war correspondent Linda Polman. According to the review,

What concerns her in this short book is the unintended consequences of
their efforts. By pouring money and goods into devastated regions,
foreign aid workers sometimes compound the disruption and debauch the
survivors.

She writes that the vast amount of money spent on aid turns the aid industry, “[S]upposedly neutral and unbiased, into a potentially
lethal force the belligerents need to enlist.”

Polman's book, which I haven't yet read, joins a growing literature challenging the conventional wisdom that aid is always good even if sometimes ineffective. The earliest arguments were made by Peter Bauer – an overview can be found in the essay collection From Subsistence to Exchange. But for years he was a lone voice. It's only in the past few years that the chorus of concern about the impact of the aid business has grown. In Dead Aid, Dambisa Moyo argued that the flow of money corrupts governments and destroys recipient economies. Bill Easterly, author of White Man's Burden and the earlier The Elusive Quest for Growth has made a career now out of challenging the aid agencies to become more effective, transparent and open to debate about the consequences of their interventions. It's time this multi-billion dollar sector recognised that in future aid will have to become properly accountable.