We're Number Twenty?!: The odd, anti-American scorekeeping of the Center for Global Development

National Review, June 30, 2003 by Jim Lacey

The Center for Global Development (CGD), a left-leaning global-poverty think tank, recently announced that the United States ranks 20th out of 21 countries when it comes to helping poorer nations -- just barely ahead of last-place Japan. Considering that the total aid given by the U.S. and Japan is equal to the combined total for the other 19 nations in the survey, it's worth asking why we fared so poorly. Could the top- ranked Dutch truly be twice as generous as we are -- or are the data simply being tortured to shame America?

The survey ranks countries according to their policies in aid, trade, investment, migration, peacekeeping, and the environment. America wins hands down in trade, but is at or near the bottom in every other category. It was only right that the CGD gave us a win on trade, considering that America has been the global growth engine for two decades; in recent years, our willingness to import products from the rest of the world (and to run a potentially harmful current-account deficit) has kept the global economy afloat. Unfortunately, the CGD does not give the U.S. much credit for making it easy for poor countries to export their goods to us. It ranks all of the countries in Europe only fractions of a point behind us on this measure -- even though the EU's trade policies do more harm to the economies of poor countries than all other external factors put together.

The combined aid from all the EU countries does not even begin to make up for the damage caused by the high tariffs that keep the poor nations' produce out of Europe; but in the CGD scoring system, that hardly matters.

A lot of things hardly matter to the CGD. Take peacekeeping: Greece scores a perfect 9.0 and the Netherlands more than doubles the U.S. score (3.5 to 1.5). Greece scores high because it has placed 2,000 soldiers in Bosnia and Kosovo. The fact that these countries are on Greece's doorstep, and that it has a strategic interest in their pacification, is not relevant. The CGD does, however, consider strategic interest relevant whenever any U.S. military action is scored. And as far as the Netherlands is concerned, only a year ago the entire Dutch government resigned in disgrace because Dutch peacekeepers had allowed 8,000 Bosnian Muslims to be slaughtered right before their eyes. In the CGD's world, the gesture is everything; it doesn't matter whether the peace is really kept. Only after American power beat the Serbs into submission did the region become safe enough for Dutch and Greek peacekeepers -- but we receive no points for that.

Nor do we get a single point for liberating 25 million Iraqis, or for investing trillions to keep most of the world free from Soviet dictatorship. We get no points for freeing Afghanistan, though the nations that put peacekeepers there after the fact get high scores for it. France and Belgium get high marks for putting peacekeepers in Africa, protecting their commercial interests, but get no deductions for moving their peacekeepers aside, allowing 500,000 people (Tutsis and Hutu political moderates) to be massacred. Ask yourself this: If you were part of an ethnic minority suffering a genocidal attack, would you want to see Dutch soldiers getting off helicopters -- or American paratroopers? In the CGD's view, America's commitment to peacekeeping is only one-third of Norway's; the oppressed of the earth must sleep well knowing that Norway stands ready to keep the peace.

When it comes to the environment, Switzerland scores highest, having received substantial points for its principled refusal to subsidize a national fishing fleet. The fact that it is a landlocked country did not come into play. The U.S., meanwhile, ranks at the bottom of the list on the environment. We are castigated for polluting more than anyone else, depleting more of the world's resources, and failing to ratify global environmental treaties, particularly Kyoto. The CGD makes no allowance for the fact that the U.S. is the world's largest economy and creates the largest portion of the world's goods. A much fairer method of ranking resource depletion would be to show how efficiently resources are used. We would score much better if it were recognized that we account for 30 percent of the world's output in a given year -- but less than 20 percent of its resource depletion.

The only way we could reduce our use of resources to the satisfaction of CGD statisticians would be to use a lot less of them -- in other words, to produce less. But there is a word for an economic situation in which both production and resource use fall: depression. And even a recession in America would crush developing economies and is a statistical certainty to drop a billion people worldwide into poverty; is that really a policy the CGD favors? One quick way to bring about a recession would be to sign the Kyoto Treaty. Its provisions would stifle U.S. economic growth for decades, in return for a measly 1 percent reduction in greenhouse gases over 100 years. Other nations have realized this: Europe, for example, has ratified the treaty but -- in no hurry to commit economic suicide -- has not implemented it. But for the CGD, it is only ratification that counts.