State-led humanitarian aid: Another case of “government failure”

A review essay on Christopher Coyne’s Doing Bad by Doing Good: Why Humanitarian Action Fails (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013). The book considers whether state-led humanitarian actions can be expected to succeed in reducing human suffering. Finding that as a rule they cannot be expected to do so, Coyne devotes the greater part of the book to an analysis of such programs in the light of the economic way of thinking, which in his approach blends public choice, basic applied price theory, Austrian economics, and the new institutional economics. He concludes that the best way to reduce human suffering in the long run is by promoting sustained economic development and that the best way to achieve such development is by adopting institutions that protect economic freedom.