Live 8, will it elevate?

[Geldof is to fast politics what McDonald's is to fast food. He is simply good at it. How can you do nothing, he screams, "watching people live on TV, dying on our screens!".
Fill up on McCartney and Madonna and you will feel much better.]
- The Sunday Times, 3 July, 2005.

In plain old vanilla, Live 8 is targeting the G8 with a 1960's leftist mantra to pour the surplus from the rich countries to the poor. What probably is speaking the loudest is the naivity of this shebang.

Is aid really the panacea?

A study by Adam and O'Connell in 1999 on aid and growth in Africa drew that aid has detrimental long-term effects. Even though aid resources are initially additional to the budget, eventually the country becomes more lax on raising tax revenues, and more aid is necessary just to keep the country on even keel. If that aid is not forthcoming, and if the country's tax raising mechanisms have atrophied, all the short-term beneficial effects of aid dissipate over the long run as it creates a culture of dependency.

A related explanation is that by expanding a government's resource envelope, aid relaxes their need to explain their actions to citizens, which may have a corrupting influence even on the best intentioned of governments in the long run, and especially in Africa. In sum, aid may not have discernible effects in the long run because it weakens institutions, and this offsets any positive effect it may have in the short run.

Today, what Africa really needs is debt relief to channelise resources for growth, and a committment from the world towards trade liberalization, infrastructure improvement and access to capital.

Interestingly, an article by the BBC covering the Live 8 concert and Nelson Mandela's remote address to the 60,000 people who attended, was filed under Entertainment > Music. I'm not even sure if the British press is taking the Live 8 jamboree seriously, leave alone the world leaders sitting atop the Scottish highlands.