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Basic needs is both an analytical concept and a strategy of aid and development. It appeared in the early 1970s, reached its apogee with its acceptance in 1976 by the World Employment Conference and in 1977 by the Development Assistance Committee of the OECD, and entered the rhetoric of most aid and development agencies. Yet its adoption by administrators was tentative, and its implementation was slow and uneven. In the late 1970s attention shifted away from basic needs to building the New International Economic Order. By 1980 basic needs as a slogan was absorbed, as a concept it was dismembered and interpreted selectively, and as a strategy it was disarmed. This essay reviews and tries to account for this rise and fall, then speculates about fashion cycles in aid and development concepts.

While debate continues on whether the foreign policies of small states are1 or are or not generically different from those of large states, little has been written explicitly about the association of size of donors with the quality of their foreign aid. This essay hypothesizes that the aid policies of small states will differ from those of large states in ways that may be measured empirically, just as Plischke, East, Sawyer, and Hermann have demonstrated with quantitative data that the general foreign policy behavior of small states varies significantly from that of large ones. More particularly, it is hypothesized that small states give higher quality aid, and give it relatively more generously, than large states. This hypothesis is grounded on general impressions—Sweden is widely acknowledged as a "good" donor and the United States an indifferent one—and on extrapolations from small state theory that will be sketched below.