Least Church-Going Rich Countries Give Most To Poor Countries

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http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0823-03.htm

Published on Tuesday, August 23, 2005 by Inter Press Service

Least Church-Going Rich Countries Give Most

By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - Nations where fewer people attend church tend to be more generous in their support for development in poor countries than those where church attendance is much greater, according to the third annual edition of the "Commitment to Development Index (CDI)", published this week in Foreign Policy magazine.

The Index, a joint project of Washington-based Foreign Policy and the Center for Global Development (CGD), found that Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden, Australia, and Norway retained their top rankings among wealthy countries for their helpfulness to poor countries from last year. Italy, Ireland, Greece and Japan were the least helpful of the 21 countries ranked by the Index.

The Index also noted that both the 12 billion dollars in private and public aid pledged by wealthy countries and their citizens for victims of last December's devastating tsunami and the debt relief deal announced earlier this summer for some of the world's poorest countries contributed to improved performance by most donors.

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It noted, for example, that the U.S. Treasury last year imposed nearly two billion dollars in tariffs on imports from the four countries that were most affected by the tsunami -- India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Thailand -- twice the 900 million dollars in relief aid approved by the U.S. Congress for the same countries last May.


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