Abstract

This article examines foreign economic aid as a problem of resource management, using the evaluation of the aid program for the Republic of China on Taiwan as a case study. Foreign aid has long been one of the largest and most controversial items in the federal budget of the United States. Over the past twenty years, the U.S. government has spent some $65 billion in assisting the economies of seventy foreign countries, an average of over $3.25 billions a year. Obviously, foreign aid poses an enormous problem of public resource management, one that is comparable to the management of defense resources or to the allocation of annual aid to American agriculture. Increasingly, United States foreign aid has been concentrated on efforts to accelerate the development of countries. One has come to view foreign aid as a means of enhancing the national security of the United States. Hopefully, it can enlarge the area and the influence of the "Free World" and deter developing countries from turning to the totalitarian methods of communism.