Page 267 - Volume 2_CHANGES_merged_with links

Obstacles to progress

Distortions

International, an Australian engineering firm; and a handful of smaller Canadian
consultancies.

Australia's GRM International merged with America's Futures Group and later became
part of Palladium International, a permanent consortium of six aid firms.
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Last year the Mail on Sunday, a British tabloid, published e-mails suggesting that the

beneficiaries of aid projects run by Adam Smith International, one of DfID's biggest
contractors, had been threatened with the loss of funding if they refused to write it
glowing testimonials. Parliamentarians inquired further, and in February said that the firm

had indeed sought inappropriately to influence their probe of DfID's contractors. The firm
has since been restructured and four senior executives have stepped down.

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Another claim is that private firms may skim too much cream from their contracts.

Without access to commercial information this is hard to evaluate; however, private firms
do seem to pay higher salaries than charities to their top executives.

***
Information about wages was available for 135 for-profit firms. For comparison we
looked at figures for 346 similar-sized American charities from CauseIQ, a data
company. The bosses of the private firms earn on average more than $500,000 a year--

more than twice as much as their non-profit peers.
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A separate study published in 2014 by Marieke Huysentruyt, then at the London School
of Economics, examined 457 DfID contracts from 1999 to 2003. She found that, when

controlling for the type of contract, the total personnel costs proposed by non-profit
firms were on average just two-fifths those proposed by private firms. What is more, the
contracts won by for-profit outfits were more likely to bust their budgets and miss

deadlines. “
"A Growing Share of Aid Is Spent by Private Firms, Not Charities." 316
The Economist ( May 2017)

*****
“ We find that CDC [ CDC Group Plc a development finance institution owned by the UK

government ] remains a deeply flawed organisation that is often doing more harm than
good. What's more, no amount of tinkering around the edges will resolve these problems,

because our concerns stem from structural issues with the way CDC works
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