Foreign aid for health services not significantly displaced, analysis says

May 11 2012

In an article published in the May 8 edition of PLoS Medicine, Rajaie Batniji, an affiliate of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and Eran Bendavid of FSI's Stanford Health Policy, found that a 2010 Lancet study by researchers at the University of Washington that "concluded that about half the money given to international governments for providing health care services isn't used as intended" is "flawed" and "should not be used to guide decisions about how much money to give and who should get it," according to a Stanford University news story. "Once Batniji and Bendavid excluded conflicting and outlying data, such as huge discrepancies between WHO and [International Monetary Fund] estimates and information about countries that were getting very small amounts of money from other countries, 'There was no significant displacement of foreign aid,' Bendavid said," the article states (Gorlick, 5/8).