Aid, trade and development are intimately linked. Aid has often facilitated a trade liberalisation agenda with free trade seen as a path to economic growth and development. However, free trade arrangements force developing countries to open up their economies to goods...
A major concern with the Australian aid program is that it favours commercial interests in aid delivery. The commercialisation of aid often results in ‘boomerang aid’ – where aid ends up funding private Australian companies, consultants, advisors, and goods and...
On the first day of the new Abbott government, it was announced that Australia’s overseas development agency, AusAID, was to be incorporated into the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. There has long been a tension between the purported aim of an aid...
The message provides some of the first detail on what the future of AusAID and Australian aid might hold since PM Tony Abbott’s aid reorganisation announcement last month.The principles include a new objective for the aid...
Roger O’Halloran, the chief executive of Palms Australia, said the Australian Volunteers for International Development program ”had got a little bit strangely fat”.By its own account AusAID’s dollar cost for sending volunteers abroad for 12...
The aid monitoring group AidWatch says the Australian government’s decision to reintegrate AusAid into the Department of Foreign Affairs shows alleviating global poverty is not a priority.The newly-elected Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, who has planned a AUS$4.5...
