The Wave Never Made It Past The Beach

From EU Referendum: A year after…

Since then, we are told, more than $13 billion has been pledged in aid, with donations from private individuals and countries coming to more than $5 billion. In Britain alone, the public contributed £400 million, eight times the previous record sum, raised for Kosovo in 1999.

That generosity, the Telegraph opines, is commensurate with the scale of the catastrophe, its timing - during the Christmas season - and the fact that 150 Britons were among more than 3,000 foreigners who died. It has been such that the current financial requirements of the afflicted areas have been more than met; one NGO, Médecins Sans Frontières, has even been refusing further donations.

But, for all the money and outpouring of sympathy, this has not satisfied needs. Say the Telegraph, the plethora of sometimes competing aid agencies - 3,645 had registered in the province of Aceh in northern Sumatra alone a month after the tsunami - and the limited managerial capacity of local governments mean that hundreds of thousands of people are still without permanent shelter and that the economy that sustains them - agriculture, fishing, tourism - remains a shadow of its former self.

Read the article for the full analysis.