Senior fellow Charles Kenny's weekly Foreign Policy column on aid effectiveness mentions the 2011 Commitment to Development.
From the Article
When the G-20 met in Cannes last week, protesters naked but for green Robin Hood caps gathered elsewhere on the French Riviera to demand a financial transactions tax -- a payment made on each bond or stock purchase, which in theory would tame the excesses of banks and hedge funds and claw back some of the costs of the mess they have made of the global economy. The protesters might have been surprised to hear that inside the G-20 meeting, a fully clothed Bill Gates was suggesting exactly the same thing.
In a break from their regularly scheduled hand-wringing over the state of global financial markets, world leaders listened to Gates's suggestions for public financing of global development in what Gates admitted was a tough environment for aid funding. He suggested that a financial transactions tax, alongside additional taxes on tobacco and carbon, could be used to help rich countries meet a global target of committing 0.7 percent of GDP to development aid. He suggested that aid "is a small investment that generates a huge return" and that such investments were precisely the ones that should be spared during cuts. Nevertheless, as the G-20 met, the charity group Oxfam was predicting that aid funding was likely to fall by nearly $10 billion in 2012, the biggest decline in 15 years.
The outlook is particularly grim in the United States, where traditional aid is on the congressional chopping block -- 165 House Republicans want to close down the U.S. Agency for International Development altogether -- and the new financing ideas Gates has proposed appear to be non-starters. U.S. representatives at the G-20 meeting balked at the idea of a financial transactions tax, arguing instead for a "financial crisis responsibility fee" that would tax liabilities of the largest financial institutions to repay the costs of the Troubled Assets Relief Program. Meanwhile, the new trade treaty the United States has signed with Colombia zeros out tariffs on U.S. tobacco imports -- not quite the fiscal direction Gates was proposing for tobacco taxes. And of course, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has yet to use its authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.