What dataset are you using for that chart? When I used the country-specific data, and looked at only obligations and disbursements, I got a significant expansion in aid starting with Bush II. Very willing to believe I’m wrong, though; I was making a chart very quickly.
What is the unit of the figures (Korea + Sub-Saharan Africa, Taiwan + Sub-Saharan Africa...)? Dollars, ok, but billions of dollars, right?
Oh, also assume you’ve seen the new Lant chapter on if aid helps: https://lantpritchett.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Development-Happened-Did-Aid-Help-handbook-chapter.pdf
What dataset are you using for that chart? When I used the country-specific data, and looked at only obligations and disbursements, I got a significant expansion in aid starting with Bush II. Very willing to believe I’m wrong, though; I was making a chart very quickly.
This is from https://foreignassistance.gov/aid-trends. Good catch, something is off with the post-Bush years. I'll take a closer look and update.
I pulled from https://foreignassistance.gov/data#tab-data-download country summary CSV, using only obligations and actual disbursements.
Thanks for the heads-up, this is fixed now.
Are you excluding military aid? I get >$200B during peak War on Terror.
Just for posterity: Military aid is included, the figures now match the foreignassistance.gov charts
and for posterity: I was double-counting when the foreignassistance.gov picks up actual disbursements