News Release

June 30, 2005

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Cato Experts Available for G8 Summit Interviews
Aid to Africa and Global Warming to Dominate Agenda

WASHINGTON— The annual G8 Summit will take place on Wednesday July 6th. Leaders from the world's most prosperous countries will discuss pressing issues, including aid to Africa and global warming. This particular summit could well see some serious divisions between the U.S. and some European states.

Cato Policy experts in International and Economic Development, Ian Vásquez and Marian Tupy, and Environment and Climate, Jerry Taylor and Pat Michaels are available for comment on next week's summit.

Debt Relief and Aid to Africa

Ian Vásquez, director of the Cato Project on Global Economic Liberty.

"If history is any guide, the G8's initiatives on debt relief and significant increases in foreign aid will do little to pull Africa out of poverty. Debt relief is really about the failure of past foreign aid; indeed, 94 percent of the debt of heavily indebted countries is due to official loans from creditors such as the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund. Sub-Saharan Africa has received nearly $500 billion in aid since the 1960s, and heavily indebted poor countries (most of which are in Africa) have received more than $30 billion in debt relief since the 1980s, yet most African countries have stagnated or become poorer in the past several decades.

"The G8 should find some way of holding aid agencies accountable for their dismal record in Africa rather than offering massive aid increases to do more of the same. The key to development is economic freedom and policy reform, not aid and debt relief."

• Cato Handbook on Policy: Chapter 68. Foreign Aid and Economic Development.

Marian L. Tupy, assistant director of the Cato Project on Global Economic Liberty.

"African governments have rightly called for an end to the developed word's hypocritical trade protectionism against African goods. But an end to trade protectionism in rich countries will not be enough to promote prosperity in Africa. Africa's gains from trade liberalization in the developed world will in fact be limited. African economies are among the least open in the world. Moreover, much of Africa suffers from low productivity, which is a result of war, corruption, a lack of private property rights, and extensive domestic barriers to the creation of wealth. Without thorough internal reform, Africa will not succeed in tackling poverty."

• "What's Wrong with Africa?" by Marian L. Tupy.
• Cato Handbook on Policy: Chapter 69. U.S. Policy toward Sub-Saharan Africa.

Global Warming

Jerry Taylor, director of natural resource studies, Cato Institute.

"The Bush administration is right to reject mandatory greenhouse gas emissions controls or concrete goals and timetables for greenhouse gas emission reductions. Warming has thus far proven modest and will likely continue to be an economic and ecological `non-event.' Restricting the consumption of fossil fuels would do far more economic and ecological harm than good and even the most optimistic analyses have a hard time proving that the benefits of emissions reductions will exceed costs in any reasonable time frame."

Patrick J. Michaels, senior fellow in environmental studies and author of Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media (Cato 2004)

"Tony Blair has repeatedly stated that the two most important problems confronting the G8 are climate change and terrorism. By conflating these two issues, he has clearly misrepresented the importance of global warming. The central behavior of our climate models indicates that warming is (and will re main) very modest, and that there is no real technology that can do anything significant about it. It would be better to save our money so that individuals can invest in future technologies rather than wasting it in a futile attempt to stop a warming that, in the last 100 years, saw life expectancies double and wealth spread throughout the developed world."

• "Is Global Warming Always Bad?" by Patrick Michaels.
• Cato Handbook on Policy: Chapter 48. Global Warming and Climate Change.