Between the steady drip of Edward Snowden leaks about the National Security Agency and Syria’s slow burn, it seems pretty easy these days to cast the United States as the villain when it comes to international affairs. That makes this holiday season an ideal one to debunk one of the longest-standing myths about the United States: that it is miserly when it comes to helping other nations through foreign aid.
Much of the myth of America’s stinginess traces its roots back to the 1970 commitment by the U.N. General Assembly that rich countries should dedicate 0.07 percent of their gross national income (GNI) to what is dubbed “official development assistance” (ODA). Although a number of European countries have embraced the target, the United States has never done so, arguing that it is a poor measure of America’s relative commitment to helping the poor in the developed world.
Critics of the United States are quick to point out that the United States, at around 0.02 percent, has one of the lowest rates of official aid to GNI of the major industrialized countries, which is true. But this statistic says a lot more about the ridiculousness of how we currently measure ODA than it does about what the United States brings to the table.
The above excerpt was originally published in Foreign Policy.
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