When a 2010 study concluded that about half the money given to
international governments for providing health care services
isn’t used as intended, skeptics who argued that foreign aid is
largely wasted were handed a powerful piece of data to bolster
their claims. Much of the money, according to the study, was
displaced – spent on something other than the intended health
care. But Stanford researchers Rajaie Batniji and Eran Bendavid
say those findings are flawed. In an article featured in the May
8edition of PLoS Medicine, Batniji and Bendavid say the 2-year-
old study by researchers at the University of Washington should
not be used to guide decisions about how much money to give and
who should get it. “We can’t say that there’s absolutely no
displacement of foreign aid, but these earlier findings are too
tenuous for the basis of policy,” said Batniji, an affiliate of
the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at the
Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Batniji and
Bendavid, an