"Whether or not there was a time for foreign aid, it is an idea whose time has gone," argues UCLA economist Deepak Lal in The Australian.

A commentary by Deepak Lal, UCLA professor of economics and the James S. Coleman Chair of International Development Studies, on the disbursement of monetary aid to developing countries, is featured today in The Australian.

Lal writes, in part:

The foreign aid programs of the past half-century are a historical anomaly. They were a response to the disastrous breakdown of the 20th-century liberal economic order during the interwar period. It has taken a long time to repair the damage, but a new liberal economic order is gradually being reconstructed. The collapse of China's communist economy and of the Soviet Union and its allies, and their growing integration in the world economic order, have been milestones.