Criticism
The Finnish government has been reported as believing that it has been misled into financing the agency. It believed it was helping developing countries but, following an evaluation of AITIC's activities in February 2008, the donor countries discovered that the organisation had merely recruited rich nations as members and had predominantly spent the money on seminars and cocktail parties.
Another criticism of the agency stems from the fact that according to AITIC's most recent annual report, in excess of two thirds of the donor-funded budget is allocated to staff salaries.
As of 2009, AITIC appears to have lost the bulk of its funding, retaining only three donors, who have committed only to two years of funding.
Read more about this topic: Agency For International Trade Information And Cooperation
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)