No abstract

No abstract

According to traditional wisdom in the foreign aid community, a donor country's official development assistance policy tends to be influenced by the political regimes' ideology. A progressive government is more likely to be humanitarian in implementing foreign aid, whereas a conservative one is apt to be more strategic and economic‐interest oriented. Given South Korea's regime change between conservatives and progressives from the Roh Tae‐woo (1988) to the Lee Myung‐bak () administrations, this article attempts to identify shifts in South Korea's aid allocation in terms of economic, security strategic, social and humanitarian aspects. The empirical analysis of the South Korean case demonstrates that aid policies did not follow the ideological differences between governments. One of the key results is that aid allocation is more attributed to the distinct characteristics of the official development assistance management system and policies than to the party politics of South Korea.

The landscape of global foreign aid is changing with the growing number of new donors, especially in Asia. While Japan is no longer overwhelmingly dominant, complexity grows as China is becoming increasingly influential as an emerging donor, and Korea is rising to be a considerable donor by joining the OECD's Development Assistance Committee. In this context, there have been numerous controversies concerning East Asian donors, and even debates about the East Asian model of aid apart from the more traditional Western models. However, only a handful of studies have examined donor behavior empirically. This study aims to assess the motives in the foreign aid allocations of China, Japan, and Korea as a group and as individual donors by methodically and empirically examining aid patterns and the East Asian model of aid. This research shows that the most important drivers of aid allocations of East Asian donor are economic, as opposed to political-strategic or humanitarian, which is viewed as typical for China, Japan, and Korea. Furthermore, this characteristic of valuing economic factors can be seen more clearly in Asia and other regions compared to in Africa. However, on an individual country level, economic motives are the primary determinants of aid allocations only for China. Japan prioritizes humanitarian factors over economic ones, and Korea does not reveal a clear pattern either way.

Active participation of the recipient governments and the beneficiaries is an essential factor in carrying out international development projects. Despite ongoing theoretical discussion on the effects of participation by the recipient governments and the beneficiaries in international development projects, there has been relatively little empirical analysis of the effects of their participation in development projects. To fill this gap, this study examines the relationship between the participation of the recipient governments and beneficiaries, and projects outcomes conducted by IFAD by validating two hypotheses. First, the higher financial contribution rate of the recipient governments results in lower evaluation results of international development projects. Second, the higher financial contribution rate of the beneficiaries leads to higher evaluation results of international development projects. In order to verify these two hypotheses, this study analyzed 166 of the IFAD Project Completion Report Validations. We did ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analyses for the panel data made from them. As a result of the analyses, the inverse relationship between the participation of the recipient governments and the outcome of the assessment holds true. On the other hand, the higher involvement of the beneficiaries leads to better results in the assessment. The results reaffirm prior research that suggested that the involvement of the recipient governments has a negative impact on project performance and that the participation of the beneficiaries has a positive impact on the projects performance. This study adopted ”financial contributions” as the variable to analyze the participation of the recipient governments and the beneficiaries; since it utilized IFAD data, the research focuses on the agriculture sector in terms of international development cooperation. The applicability of these findings in other areas of international development cooperation therefore to be tested in future research.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract