ABSTRACT
Since 1970, the international development sector has focused its policy architecture around the target of 0.7 per cent of gross national income towards official development aid. To date, only six countries have reached this target and aid flows have become eclipsed by remittances as the main source of income for developing countries. Despite the limitations of aid and its ties to furthering donors’ economic trading interests, international non-governmental organisations cling to it as a policy comfort blanket. This chapter argues that rather than narrowly advancing the aid agenda, the international development sector should engage with a wider raft of policy issues that impact on countries in the global South including illicit financial flows, debt and the operation of tax havens which deny billions in revenue to developing countries every year. Above all, it needs to meaningfully address the question of neoliberalism to which aid and the sustainable development goals are feeble responses and unable to plug the development holes left by the revenue lost to developing countries in net outflows every year to the global North.
