2025-02-27
32 分钟Hello, Alan Beattie here.
I just want to let you know
that the episode you're about to listen to was recorded a few short hours before the UK government announced plans to cut its aid budget from 0.5% of GDP to 0.3%.
Sometimes interviews get overtaken by events.
But as you'll hear in her very first answer,
my guest today proved quite prescient about what was about to happen.
One of the very first things that Donald Trump did upon taking office was to suspend all US foreign aid threatening the program which has put 20 million people with HIV in developing countries on antiretroviral drugs.
The following weekend, Elon Musk, as part of his rampage through the federal government,
single handedly put through the wood chipper,
in his own words, the U.S. agency for International Development.
That's the U.S. aid body,
which was set up by President Kennedy in 1961 and last year disbursed more than $40 billion a year in around 130 countries.
After several years in which budgetary constraints in rich countries had already led to aid being cut back,
this was a serious blow to low income countries dependent on assistance.
At the same time, financial flows from rising powers like China,
India, Saudi Arabia and Russia have been increasing.
What will the new world of aid and development look like and how with a,
let's say, turbulent outlook for geopolitics and trade mean for low and middle income countries?
Foreign.
Beatty, the FT's senior trade writer and this is the Economic show from the Financial Times.