This entry has a chart of the aid pledged by various countries (and the EU) to help the tsunami victims in south Asia. I rate each pledge in proportion to the GDP. Most of the pledges are between 1 and 100 millionths of the GDP for the country.
I posted these figures as comments in the appropriate discussions, but I'm reposting them here to make them easier to find and reference.
Originally posted on 29Dec2004
Aid in PPM
First, it's not true that ranked by GDP the US is at the bottom. We're just near it. Here are the figures for the countries that I can get aid data on:
Pledge GDP [millions] Pledge Quotient
Australia 7,800,000 579,662 13.45
Britain 907,000 1,606,853 0.56
Canada 4,000,000 963,550 4.15
China 2,600,000 6,435,838 0.40
EU 4,000,000 35,175,761 0.11
Japan 30,000,000 3,582,515 8.37
Kuwait 1,000,000 37,993 26.32
Singapore 1,200,000 104,042 11.53
UAE 2,000,000 Unknown Unknown
US 15,000,000 10,871,095 1.37
In this chart the GDP is in millions of international dollars (dollars corrected for purchasing power parity--PPP). The "Pledge Quotient" is the pledged dollars divided by the GDP. In other words, it's a measure of the number of dollars pledge per million dollars of GDP, or parts per million. (I think this is an easy way to see just how small a contribution it is. In other words, for every dollar we earn on average per year we are spending 1.37
millionths of a dollar in aid.)
NOTE: These are very rough figures and don't take into account individual contributions, only government contributions. These figures are based on the best data I could research off the Web last night and they've probably already changed. Also, the amount for the EU is just for the EU itself and does not include contributions already pledged by many countries within the EU (Britain, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Spain, etc.) It also doesn't include non-financial aid, such as assistance by the military (especially the Indian navy and no doubt our own) nor pledges of doctors, airplanes, etc. Also, I didn't count the $20 million loan that the US put up because it's not in the same class as a grant. I can't tell if it's more of a help or a burden to give someone a loan in a country that's just been devastated. How are they supposed to pay it back?
Looking at the data it is clear that certain countries have been particularly generous. I wouldn't say that it's a rich-country-bad/poor-country-good trend, however. In the generous category I think Australia, Canada and Japan stand out among the "rich" countries. The large immediate pledges from UAE and Kuwait are particularly noteworthy and I hope are a trend for the rich countries in the ME. But I think the real surprise is China, which I don't think of as "rich" by any stretch, and yet they came up with millions already.
So, is the US being stingy in its aid? It remains to be seen what kind of individual contributions are given, but by government standards we are off by a factor of 5 or 10 based on our GDP.
References:
The best list of donors I found was at Sympatico. The GDP values are from Wikipedia, where you can find a reference for PPP.
Update posed on 30Dec2004
Aid in PPM Update
Here is an update to the aid based on the latest figures I can find on the Internet. I've removed the GDP column (you can get these figures from Wikipedia) and added a column with the source of the aid pledges.
CONSOLIDATED AID
Pledge
Country Pledge [US$] Source Quotient
----------------- -------------- ------------ --------
Australia 27,000,000 news.com 46.58
Cambodia 40,000 Al Jezeera 1.36
Canada 33,000,000 Al Jezeera 34.25
China 2,600,000 Sympatico 0.40
EU 45,000,000 news.com --
EU Countries 77,863,086 -- --
Total EU 122,863,086 -- 3.66
India 23,000,000 Al Jezeera 7.42
Japan 40,000,000 Al Jezeera 11.17
Kuwait 2,100,000 Sympatico 55.27
Norway 8,170,000 news.com 48.34
Qatar 10,000,000 Al Jezeera Unknown
Saudi Arabia 10,000,000 news.com 35.57
Singapore 1,200,000 Sympatico 11.53
South Korea 2,000,000 news.com 2.33
Taiwan 5,250,000 news.com Unknown
UAE 2,000,000 Sympatico Unknown
US 15,000,000 Sympatico 1.38
INDIVIDUAL EU COUNTRIES
Country Pledge Source
----------------- -------------- ------------
Austria 1,360,000 news.com
Britain 28,930,000 news.com
Czech Republic 445,760 news.com
Denmark 15,590,000 news.com
Finland 3,410,000 news.com
France 20,442,000 Al Jezeera
Germany 2,720,000 news.com
Greece 204,345 news.com
The Netherlands 2,720,000 news.com
Poland 335,821 news.com
Slovakia 231,660 Al Jezeera
Slovenia 113,500 Al Jezeera
Spain 1,360,000 news.com
-----------------
Total 77,863,086 --
The "Pledge Quotient" is the pledged dollars divided by the GDP (not shown).
Note: All of the caveats from the original post apply, especially that these are still very rough figures and bound to change. I should add that I had to convert a number of these to US dollars. In doing that, I used Yahoo exchange rates for Euros and the implicit exchange rates on news.com for Canadian dollars. I used the most current figure that I could find where it was significantly different from the previous ones. (The order is Sympatico, news.com and Al Jezeera.)
I put this up mainly because I think that we need to have good basic data from which to draw conclusions and back up our talking points. If we are going to press the U.S. government for more funds, for example, it helps to know where we stand relative to other countries. I think GDP is one of the fairer ways to do this, even if it's not ideal.
Also, I still give the U.S. no credit for a line of credit. But even if you fed that in, it wouldn't give you a pledge quotient of 46.58, to name a specific value.