This is ad hominem if I've ever seen it. Especially in corrupt societies, I feel like jobs would fare much better than donations by: 1) Increasing economic activity which is required for growth 2) Making sure the money goes to where it's supposed to, and used the way it's supposed to. (Remember the stolen OLPCs? Donations don't always make it to the destination if they're juicy targets.)
A number of countries experimented with shock treatment capitalism as a means of quickly bringing their economies up to speed.
Take Russia or Bolivia as examples of what can go wrong. In each case, they quickly freed up their economy and tried to privatize everything. The problem was, they had no real legal system in place to properly check that activity. Key national industries went into the hands of just a few wealthy people (see Russia's Oligarch's). In Bolivia, after shock treatment, there was a rise in unemployment, a fall in industrial output, and a fall in per capita GDP.
At my university (50k students) I started the first micro-credit organization and we've made over 100 loans to entrepreneurs in developing nations -- so I am not against capitalism or anything like that.
But I've studied economic development enough to know that you have to take a multi-pronged approach to promoting development. It's not just about going full-free market or full donations/state involvement. It's requires a mix.
Upvoted for insight! This is true, however I wasn't trying to suggest shock treatment. As you said, there is significant evidence against that. In fact, I don't think such a thing happens often without a change in regime. However, production and a larger workforce still do contribute much more to growth. Constant aid, however, has the danger of making the economy reliant on it. Thus, a transition from the latter to the former is desirable.
For a country that was severely screwed by everyone 60-odd years ago, and crawled out from under the iron curtain less than 20 years ago, they are doing quite well, I think. Polish people have a lot of heart.
You can blame people like Larry Summers, who advocated shock therapy when he was Chief Economist of the World Bank, devastating the economic potential of the former Soviet bloc.
