抄録
This article describes the trends of Japan's Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) and the author's view of what technical assistance within ODA should be in the future. Japan is currently the largest contributor of ODA in the world and plans to deliver another seventy to seventy-five billion dollars during the next five years. ODA consists of grants, technical assistance - on a grant basis - , and loans. Japan has focused on loans. The amount of technical assistance, on the other hand, has increased year by year. Technical assistance is the so-called "assistance to enhance human resources", and consists in sending professionals to the assisted countries and receiving trainees from them. Technological systems consists of the "face", or technologies themselves such as technologies for production and know-how, and the "underside", or back-up technology system such as industrial standards and patent systems. The irreversible internationalization of production technology systems be inter-connected, which, in turn, necessitates the systematization of basic back-up technology. Thus, the author claims that technical assistance in ODA should be changed to focus on the improvement of the back-up technology system because it is the quickest and most effective way to transfer standardized individual technologies on improved back-up technology system. In fact, the Japanese government plans to implement a project starting in 1994 as a model case to improve the back-up technology system in the ASEAN region.
