re: charleslew thanks to the american heroes
Charles, I am now back in my office and have my hand on the report I referred to about American generosity. The report is from the Economist of the 24 May 2003 and is a summary of figures from the OECD Development Assistance Committee. That Committee says of its work and the source of its data: "DAC statistics collect information on official and private resource flows to countries on the DAC List of Aid Recipients (developing countries and countries in transition), broken down by major category of expenditure. These data are provided annually on a questionnaire by all DAC Members"
So based on that reference to private sources it includes all that non Government stuff.
To put the case more clearly, as my memory was not quite right, the data from 2002 is presented as %GDP. The most generous Country on that basis was Denmark with about 0.93% GDP going in AID, Norway and the Netherlands are above 0.8%, and Sweeden was about 0.71%. And where is the US? 0.12%!!! Australia gave way about 0.23% of GDP so we were not so good either.
France who the US loves to hate at the moment, gave away 0.38% GDP at 5.2 Billion US$ with about 60 Million people, and the US gave away 12.9 US$ with a population of 285 million.
