Japan's Foreign Aid Policy: A Capacity for Leadership?

Rix, Alan

doi:10.2307/2759670

Cited by 18 publications

(15 citation statements)

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“…Although Japan's Foreign Aid policy in international development is massive and substantial compared to most countries, Japan is not yet a leader (Rix, 1990). Japan is doing its best as a financial supporter in shouldering globalization responsibilities, but criteria to be the world leader must also include the possession of resources and politico-military superiority.…”

Section: Discussion In the Pastmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing the Look East Policy: Moving Beyond Work Culture and Ethic

Khalid

Sulaiman

Isa³

et al. 2013

ASS

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The Look East Policy (LEP) was introduced in 1981 after former Prime Minister Mahathir’s East and West competing perspectives contributed to a nationalist enthusiasm to turn Malaysia into a new industrialized country using Japan and Korea as models. This paper reassesses LEP within the framework of policy evaluation and addresses its long-term impact, with a few twists. For the purpose of this article, only Japan will be discussed as a model for LEP. This article argues that LEP has contributed to Malaysia’s progress in becoming an industrialized country. This research applies assessment indicators such as input, output, processes, performance, and cost considerations to evaluate the achievements made by LEP in terms of work culture, ethics, investments, and human capital development. Intensive interviews were conducted with 30 respondents from various organizations with similar profiles, each contributing experience such as studying, living, working, co-operating and collaborating with Japanese counterparts. Themes were developed based on sequential questions occurring in the narrative interviews’ transcriptions. This study shares respondents’ voices and it reports them as they are. The findings show that LEP produced both advantages and disadvantages, but the former seem to blend in better in organizations, individuals’ lives, and an incremental effort to establish a strong industrialized state

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Section: Discussion In the Pastmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing the Look East Policy: Moving Beyond Work Culture and Ethic

Khalid

Sulaiman

Isa³

et al. 2013

ASS

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“…Aid has become a measure of Japan's foreign policy leadership in the international community (Rix, 1993). As Japan emerged as the world's largest bilateral donor in the 1990s, questions about its international role naturally came to the forefront.…”

Section: Perspectives On Japanese Foreign Aidmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Voters, interest groups, and other sources of political power obtain their information regarding foreign policy events and actions primarily through the news media, which in turn provide much of the basis for their political opinions and evaluations of the leaders choosing those policies. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) remain marginal to aid policy making, and are viewed by the bureaucracy as implementers of development assistance priorities rather than makers of those priorities (Rix, 1993). Rational leaders, in turn, can be expected to make decisions based at least partially upon news coverage as well as the expected impact that alternative policies will have on the content of media reporting ( Van Belle, 1993).…”

Section: Foreign Aid and Domestic Politicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Mainstream media, it is argued, are reluctant to publicize critical news about public officials, and often wait for the tabloid press to raise a scandal before proceeding with sensitive stories (Farley, 1996). Agenda setting, moreover, is clearly a media function which the press exercises in the foreign aid realm, perhaps not always well (Rix, 1993). The major media pool resources to support independent international news sources, including the international wire services and foreign press.…”

Section: Foreign Aid and Domestic Politicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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News Media Coverage Influence on Japan's Foreign Aid Allocations

Potter

Belle

2004

Japanese Journal of Political Science

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This study explores the role that news coverage plays in the allocation of Japanese development aid. Conceptually, it is expected that democratic foreign policy officials, including those working in bureaucratic governmental structures will try to match the magnitude of their actions with what they expect is the public's perception of the importance of the recipient. News media salience serves an easily accessible indicator of that domestic political importance and, in the case of foreign aid, this suggests that higher levels of news coverage of a less-developed country will lead to higher aid commitments. The statistical analysis demonstrates that the level of news coverage is a statistically significant factor in Japanese aid distributions. More significantly, the analysis demonstrates that separating grant aid from other forms of aid is critical for the empirical examination of the determinants of Japanese aid.Foreign aid allocations are generally explained in terms of international politics or state-centric models of foreign policy. Comparative analyses have demonstrated that aid allocations tend to reflect the international political roles and interests of individual aid donors (see, for example, Schraeder, Hook, and Taylor (1998);Meernik, Krueger, and Poe (1998);Noël and Thérien (1995);Hook (1995);Lumsdaine (1993);and McKinlay (1979)). Studies of how foreign policy influences from sources other than the international political arena affect foreign aid allocations are underrepresented in the scholarly literature on foreign aid. Moreover, despite differences in national aid programs and the well-known political differences between the various donor states,

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“…Researchers adopting a foreign policy approach feature the evolution of Japan's politicalmilitary-security relations, especiallywith USA, but diverge on the issue of foreign pressure. On the one hand, researchers such as Calder (1988) and Rix (1990) emphasize external pressure and the reactiveness of the Japanese state that encourages the Japanese to burdenshare by disbursing more aid to countries important to American global stra-tegic priorities. Others such as Pyle (1992) highlight the process by which Japanese policies and institutions dovetail with international practice through external pressure.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reshaping Japanese Foreign Aid for the Post‐cold War Era

Grant

1995

Tijd voor Econ & Soc Geog

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Japan recently became the world's largest bilateral aid donor. Tokyo views foreign aid as a 'main pillar' of its foreign policy for addressing post-Cold War global challenges. Western understanding of Japanese foreign aid remains a poorly understood perspective both in the foreign aid and Japan studies literature. Therefore, this article improves conceptualization of Japan's aid activities by focusing on past trends, present changes and possible future developments. An approach is adopted in this study that focuses on both the Japanese domestic policymaking environment and the international context. Empirical evidence suggests that theJapanese employed an 'entrepreneurial' approach to aid that incorporates strong private sector involvement and a regional Asia-Pacific concentration but that its a p proach is gradually changing toward a more multidimensional one. The 'perceived' success of Japanese aid involvement enables Tokyo to promote its international development approach as an alternative to the Western development norm.

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Japan's Foreign Aid Policy: A Capacity for Leadership?

Cited by 18 publications

References 0 publications

Assessing the Look East Policy: Moving Beyond Work Culture and Ethic

Assessing the Look East Policy: Moving Beyond Work Culture and Ethic

News Media Coverage Influence on Japan's Foreign Aid Allocations

Reshaping Japanese Foreign Aid for the Post‐cold War Era

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