Dambisa Moyo Discussing the Global Financial Crisis in Africa | Big Think.

Dambisa Moyo Discussing the Global Financial Crisis in Africa

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Dambisa Moyo discusses the impact of reducing African aid budgets.

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Dambisa Moyo:

Dambisa Moyo is an economist and New York Times best-selling author of Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There is a Better Way For Africa, published in 2009.

Moyo’s second book entitled How the West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly - And the Stark Choices that Lie Ahead is scheduled for publication in August 2010.

Moyo was born and raised in Lusaka, Zambia. She holds a Doctorate in Economics from Oxford University. In 1997, Moyo earned a Master of Public Administration (MPA) in International Development from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. She also earned a Master of Business Administration (MBA) in Finance and Bachelor of Science (BS) in Chemistry from American University in Washington D.C. She worked for the World Bank as a Consultant and at Goldman Sachs where she worked in the debt capital markets and as an economist in the global macroeconomics team. Moyo's thoughts about ending aid to Africa are featured as part Big Think's "Dangerous Ideas" blog.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: How will the Global Financial Crisis affect the aid model?

Moyo: Well, I think there would definitely be an impact in a negative one at that, because one can envisage the situation where Westerners, Western governments who are dealing with their own crisis at home are going to be faced with shrinking budgets and needs to borrow more money quite aggressively. So, the bailout programs sort of very familiar to Western in the United States, but also more generally in doing the countries are become a very big deal. Two countries in particular Italy has been very public about cutting back it’s 80 budget by 50%, but also when Britain movements in the exchange rate have meant that the actual notion amount of money that they going to be giving two developing countries has shrunk. So, these types of factors which are an artifact of the credit crisis mean that the aid model is really under threat.