Based on the stats in my earlier-posted list, here’s the per capita ranking for selected nations and their government contributions to the tsunami relief effort (it would be interesting to do the nation-by-nation stats on private contributions, too, but I need to get off my butt and so something resembling real work at some point today). And yes, that number for Norway is correct. The government in Oslo raised its initial pledge of 100 million Norwegian kroner (about $16.3 million) to 1.1 billion kroner ($180 million) (as reported in the English edition of Aftenposten). Norway’s population is just 4.6 million, so the per capita figure exceeds that of even the sparsely populated Number 1 donor in total aid, Australia). If the United States made a commitment at a similar rate to Norway’s, its aid figure would come to a little more than $11.5 billion.
(Just for fun, I’ve thrown in each country’s world ranking in per capita GDP from the CIA World Factbook; the rankings are in parentheses after each country’s per capita aid figure in U.S. dollars).
–Updated on 1/5/04 to reflect new aid commitments from Australia and Germany.
–Updated on 1/8/04 to reflect new aid commitments and add Kuwait, New Zealand, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Switzerland.
–Updated on 1/8/04 to add Finland and the Netherlands and update French aid total.
–Updated on 1/9/04 to reflect increased aid commitment from Finland.
–Updated on 1/11/04 to reflect increased aid commitment from Canada.
1. Norway: $39.13 (Per capita GDP rank: 2)
2. Australia: $37.82 (14)
3. Qatar: $29.76 (36)
4. Denmark: $14.11 (8)
5. Canada: $13.24 (11)
6. Switzerland: $13.00 (7)
7. Finland: $12.56 (22)
8. Sweden: $8.33 (24)
9. Germany: $8.17 (21)
10. United Arab Emirates: $8.00 (32)
11. Kuwait: $4.35 (47)
12. Japan: $3.91 (17)
13. Taiwan: $2.21 (31)
14. Netherlands: $2.09 (16)
15. Spain: $1.69 (34)
16. New Zealand: $1.68 (35)
17. United Kingdom: $1.61 (19)
18. European Union: $1.36 (26)
19. United States: $1.19 (3)
20. Saudi Arabia:$1.17 (69)
21. France: $1.05 (20)
22. China: $0.05 (120)
Told you: Shrub should have unpeeled a billion last Tuesday. It would have KILLED in the PR battle. Now we’re stuck playing catch-up. The Clinton-Bush Sr. thing was good, but it’s still catch-up. And no amount of ex-presidential gravitas is going to match 1.1B kroner. Awesome, Norway. Awesome!
You’re so right about that. A big chunk of cash up front would have set expectations for the rest of the world. I also agree that the G.H.W. Bush/Bill Clinton thing was a good move (of course, Young Bush can’t do that without making it clear that government, of course, is NOT part of the answer; government help overseas is confined to blowing up stuff to build democracy). Of course, now that money is coming in, the big thing will be organizing a meaningful long-term effort to rebuild stuff. It might be a nice gesture for Japan and the United States to say, hey, you want a tsunami warning system here? You got it. We’ll see.