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Comment by walterbell | Hacker News Reader

Importers: http://insightfulinteraction.com/armsimport.html

The importer data is way more provocative to me than the exporter data, which met my expectations.

True. I have noticed that we in Sweden give away a rather substantial portion of our national gross product in order to fight poverty in other countries. Most of those countries - including India are in this list. The outcome seems to be that we give away money to cater for their poor, while they happily exploit their own workers to out-compete us on every market, while maintaining huge military budgets that they apparently spend on buying things from our most aggressive neighbor. Excellent.

If you think Sweden gives India any kind of substantial money to reduce poverty, you're seriously mistaken.

India gets huge amounts of arms import and otherwise support to act as a geopolitical counterweight to China. Both USA and Russia are interested in limiting Chinese influence in South East Asia, and assisting India is a natural way to do so.

Oh, also, you should probably think through what the actual goal of foreign support is. Aside from short term humanitarian aid, the stated goal of these funds is to allow systemic uplift. The actual goal is more likely to combination of domestic feel goodism, and permanently crippling the recipient country's ability to uplift on their own will.

Wow, top 6 importers were surprising: India UAE Saudi Arabia China Pakistan Azerbaijan

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