There is an old saying that goes something along the lines of “Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, but teach that man to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime.” Although this proverb is usually directed at children, the same principle can be applied to “developing” nations who time after time receive enormous amounts of monetary aid from more prosperous countries, and time after time make little or no use of the support. In particular, debt forgiveness, which is “a creditor's act of excusing a borrower's repayment of an existing obligation” (Carrasco), is an often used example of economic aid that often has adverse effects. The first documented case of a country relieving another party of their debt was in England in 1542, when its government passed its first bankruptcy law, although an even older occurrence was reported in the Bible in the book of Deuteronomy (Greene). Since then, this attempt to lift a country out of an economic hole has more often than not resulted in little or no forward progress. Foreign aid programs, such as debt forgiveness, support ineffective and possibly corrupt governments while discouraging both economic growth in that country and potential loans from other countries.
While relieving a country’s debt attempts to reduce poverty in a developing country by allowing the country’s government to concentrate on issues such as hunger and industrial growth, it will be ultimately futile because it does not address the most prevalent issue in under-developed nations: ineffective government policies. In many countries experiencing economic difficulty, the government is to blame with wasteful spending and general squandering of the wealth provided by other nations. When a country is continually given money with no obligation to return it, its government will become complacent in supporting itself and remaining independent. For example, Africa contains some of the poorest countries in the world (Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and Tanzania), yet it holds...