Aiding business

Poverty reduction in the world’s poorest countries risks being diluted by the government’s increasing tendency to devote a bigger slice of Britain’s aid budget to pursuing the national interest, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has warned. In recent years less of overseas development assistance  spending was being channeled through the Department for International Development, with a growing emphasis on ensuring UK firms benefited. The IFS said there had been a change of emphasis since 2015, with more than a quarter of the aid budget now being spent outside DFID in 2016 up from 14% two years earlier.