From a Mother Jones magazine article (Mother Jones is a very liberal magazine)

The anti-aid argument certainly has some validity. Africa, after all, received some $450 billion in aid during the Cold War, but its GDP declined 0.59 per year between 1975 and 2000. And as with Ronald Reagan's "welfare queens," horror stories abound: David Rieff recently published a piece in the British magazine Prospect explaining how $100 million in famine aid to Ethiopia in 1985 merely bolstered the country's Stalinist regime and prolonged civil strife and famine. Other arguments against aid typically surface: it only throws fattens the wallets of corrupt regimes, that there's not enough accountability, or that it's better to give countries a hand-up than a hand-out. Meanwhile, since World War II much of East Asia appears to have used trade, not aid, to launch itself on the high arc of prosperity