Highest Foreign Aid Recipients

missed China and Tanzania.

really strange China is a leading aid recipient... 2nd largest economy in the world and growing rapidly, loaning enormous amounts of money to other countries like the US, investing enormous amounts of money all over the world, doesn't have enough money to spare to crack the top givers list and in fact they need aid? weird. Though I know there are still millions of Chinese living below the poverty line.

No credit for "Congo"? I wish all you quiz-makers could agree on one set of rules.

Agreed. Please accept Congo.

Random question, cpg: how come when I click on your page, nothing shows up? People with no quizzes normally don't have a link (like Arp2600 down there).

Ah, good point. I looked him up on the "all users" list and it claims he has one, so he must've deleted it.

On my "answers are countries" quizzes that have ended up featured you will find a few more type-ins than on most quizzes here... for example I always accept "KSA" for Saudi Arabia, "DPRK" for North Korea, and "ROK" for South Korea. I think usually "ROC" for Taiwan, and "PRC" for China, as well. But the first few are probably because I've lived in Saudi and Korea before and got used to using these acronyms myself.

I had no idea you lived in Saudi Arabia. It's not like it's mentioned in the comments of every single quiz I've ever taken......

so..... you haven't taken that many quizzes, then? Welcome to the site. Very topical and timely response, too, as I left the KSA 6 years ago, this comment was made 4 years ago, and Dan started accepting KSA for Saudi Arabia about 2 years ago. Way to stay on top of things.

Oh I never realized KSA started being accepted! I guess I didn't ever try it... Well that's cool anyway.

Officially? Who is officiating the informal use of country short names?

What is meant by "Name the countries that receive the most foreign aid from governments of other countries." I don't understand; other than what?

Other than themselves...

Ha ha, this.

This felt like an anti-America gotcha comment...SQUASHED by Arp!

+1

Oh ok, didn't think of that. Anyway, given the figures, I don't think this quiz excludes the US.

What??? There are some paranoid Americans on this site, seeing criticism where is none. My point was that there is redundancy here: "foreign" aid is only able, by definition, to come from governments of other countries.

I understand you Jerry. Literary redundancy.

Other than NGOs like Red Cross, MSF, UNICEF etc

I thought Israel would have been on the list.

This surprised me too, Israel receives about $3bn annually from the USA. Maybe it's not counted because it's technically a loan?

Somehow Palestine is on the list with 2.44 billion.

Here's the military assistance quiz re the US - still trying to locate similar data from Russia and Saudi Arabia for some balance, but google searching is getting nowhere.

Odd...comments from before the quiz was made.

There is more here than a "grain of salt " compromise of truth. First of all, the quiz does not define aid, and as someone associated with this for some years, that is far from easy. Do we consider food aid the same as military? Are transfers counted the same as credits (often with tight strings attached)? How do we include salaries and benefits to foreign administrators (i.e. money that never leaves the donor country, but is often counted as "aid")? And Israel is strangely absent from the list. This quiz is misleading and should be dumped.

Why is Turkey receiving foreign aid?

There are many very poor parts of the country, though nowadays I guess they get most of the money to keep Syrians in Turkey.

The aid isn't doing any good. Most of these countries are still very poor

Not true. In 1800 the global average child mortality rate was 43.3%. In the 1950s it was 19.5%. In 1990 it was 7.4%. In 2013 it was under 4%. This is just one metric. But in pretty much all ways life around the world and the global economic situation continues to improve. Thanks, Obama!

I wasn't arguing that developmental assistance is the *primary* explanation for the rise of global wages and living conditions, just against the idea that it does no good and that situations have not improved.

Democratically elected government? Assad inherited the position from his dictator father. There may be elections in the Robert Mugabe mold, but it's a bit of a stretch to call him democratically elected.

^this. and also... when did the West invade Syria? You are so confused about so many things.

Agreed. I understand that 'the west' invaded Iraq kind of but not Syria. its own people tried to over throw their "democratically elected" "president".

This one is tougher than the donors quiz. Turkey surprised me.

Me too. Right in the middle of both donors and recipients. Why not just keep the money for your own people?

You needn't be ashamed of anything. The ones who need to be ashamed are the colonizers.

exactly

I agree, there's no need to be ashamed, but also I see very few people who are currently colonizers. Maaaybe France because they still have many territories, but probably not.

Not that I support india being here , but with the British having looted $45 trillion from India and oppressed Indians for over 300 years , the British ought to pay back.

@jkabq you're right, no apologies are necessary. However, that's because India, despite being treated horribly by the British for centuries, rose up and showed the world their strength. They now have a stronger economy and a better army than the UK.

Please accept Afganistan. I'm pretty sure that's what I type on other quizzes.

Why don't you just put the H in?

lol

Missed Ghana and Bangladesh (again)...

Given that most of the countries on this list are relatively large (in population at least) developing countries, I was surprised that Pakistan, Indonesia, and the Philippines aren't on here. Any explanations for them?

I don't think the US gives Pakistan that much aid because they give a lot more aid to India. Indonesia and Philippines... I dunno.

Though the US is by far the most generous giver of foreign aid in the world, this quiz is about total foreign aid received and is not exclusively about American foreign aid.

Pakistan is actually the 11th leading recipient of US foreign aid, beating out India by a substantial margin, but India receives more aid from other countries.

Both Indonesia and the Philippines receive hundreds of millions in foreign aid from the US, but that's not enough to crack the top 20 of this list. It's actually not even in the top 20 of US foreign aid recipients.

True, but I imagine that other countries would have similar aid giving patterns to America. I imagine America might give more aid to countries it is involved in, such as Afghanistan and Iraq, or is allied with, such as Egypt... but at the end of the day the main goal of foreign aid is to improve the living standards of the global poor regardless. It makes more sense to me for aid to flow to Pakistan and the Philippines, which have larger populations and are substantially poorer than countries like Jordan and Colombia.

In the Americas, why aren't places like Haiti, Venezuela, Peru, Bolivia etc on the list? Colombia does not make much sense, unless it's due to political reasons ('war on drugs'), suppressing the trade unions etc.

update for Ukraine