Reorienting Japan's Development Cooperation for the 21^st Century

抄録

Since 1954 Japan supported both bilaterally and multilaterally the economic and social development of developing countries, but with mixed results. Nearly all the developing countries in East Asia where a major portion of the Japanese official development assistance (ODA) have so far gone, have sustained high economic growth with moderate equity and large advance in human development with the exception of Cambodia confronted with many years of armed conflicts and the Philippines with two decades of massive corruption.

While domestic factors such as literacy, skills, work ethics, savings, entrepreneurial spirit, macroeconomic policies, bureaucratic efficiency and governance have been most crucial to sustained economic growth, and while trade and investment have been far more important than foreign aid as contributors to economic growth, ODA has made some positive impact when it focused particularly on the development of economic and social infrastructures, institutional capacity building and appropriate macroeconomic and sectoral policies. In other words, ODA has been most effective in assisting developing countries to make economic and social progress when used to expand, improve and strengthen their long-run absorptive capacity in human, institutional and physical terms.

A close examination of the Japanese ODA revealed that much of what was said above reflected the essence of the Japanese approach. There seems, however, to be a large room for improving the quality of the Japanese ODA in the 21^st century, which will be vital since it is feared that its ODA might not grow significantly as with the other major donors. In addition to policy redirections in favour of sustained economic growth through market forces, equity, environment and human development through public policy intervention and increased assistance to transition economies and least developed countries particularly in subsaharan Africa, the improvement of ODA management will be extremely important so as to enhance recipient ownership, transparency, accountability, capacity building, country-specific approaches, decentralisation of aid decision-making, localisation of aid staffing and resources, the division of labour, coordination and complementarily among donors and cooperation/partnership with NGOs and local governments and involvement of the private sector.