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
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