Aid
But
13. It has been the policy of successive governments to regard
the reasonable needs of the dependent territories as a first charge
on the aid funds which can be made available in any given year.
Most of the territories are small, and, as I shall show, the suns
already being spent on development and budgetary assistance are in
some cases extremely high when measured on a per capita basis.
I am convinced that we must take this concept of giving periority
to the dependent territories still further by extending it into the
field of technical assistance, including the provision of expatriate
civil servants, wherever vacancies cannot be filled by recruitment
from within the indigenous populations. In this way the flexible
policy of HIG towards the development of the political institutions
which are most likely to meet the political aspirations of the dependent territories will be supplemented and reinforced by development programmes calculated to improve economic and social conditions with all possible speed.
14. I say "with all possible speed" because the rate of social, and
economic growth of the remaining dependencies, as with all developing countries, is governed as much by absorptive capacity as by the availability of capital aid. Our programmes of technical assistance do of course go a long way towards increasing absorptive capacity, by the provision of training facilities for indigenous people and in the interim by providing expatriate expertise: our capital aid is complementary to this, and in recent years the only constraint on the amount which has gone to the dependencies has been their ability to
absorb it.
Present
In
15. The 1969 figures are the latest I have for actual disbursements under the aid programme and there are some interesting points in them. In that year our total official bilateral aid disbursements were £168 million of which some £1 million went to the dependencies.
othe words, those people living in the dependencies far fewer than
about 1 per cent ot the population of the developing world receive nearly 10 per cent of our bilateral aid. Looking at the 1969 figures in
another way
6
J
-
on an aid per capita basis the same preference in
/favour
?
6.