This article considers economic grounds for giving aid to developing sates and their citizens. After reviewing the current sate of economic litereture, the article proposes an optimal foreign aid policy as a market enhancing strategy. In this view, foreign aid can be understood as a method to compensate market failures in trade, capital movement, and technological transfer in international economy.

This paper is a critical survey of recent literature on foreign aid with insight from the information and contract theory. Various problems, such as transfer paradox and fungibility are reviewed.

Finally, the economic literature of Japanese experience of Official Development Assistance will be reviewed.

Can Africa Compete? Yes, it can if it is competitive. But how can Africa be competitive? Heckscher-Ohlin theorem, the most important one in the field of international economics, states that nations export goods that intensively use their relatively abundant factor and import those goods that embody the relative large amounts of the scarce factor. This type of trade brings more profits to the countries involved, thus makes African countries competitive.

This study empirically clarified that African countries are very labour abundant, in fact much more than most Asian countries, and carefully chose industries which make Africa competitive. Findings are;

① As for the kind of industry, clothes and textile goods industry, precision machine industry, textile industry and electrical goods industry are recommended, because of their labour intensiveness, ample volume circulation in the world economy and high backward linkage effects to the domestic economy.

② Diversification in labour intensive industries, especially with making connection to other industries, is also of paramount importance.

Messages here are loud and clear. African countries, with small local market and with low capital intensiveness, should take labour-use industries and export goods made there for their industrialization. There are industries that suit the stages of development of African countries.

In recent years, there has been an increase in the number of forestry related projects based on social forestry approach. Social forestry approach is suitable for projects in developing countries in the view point of effective afforested area management, local people empowerment, encouraging projects' ownership and so on.

This study discusses the current demand for evaluation of the forestry-related projects, mainly focused on post-project evaluation for the social forestry approach based projects. Those social forestry based projects have relatively short history, especially in the field of technical cooperation.

Therefore there have few examples of post-project evaluation and authorized evaluation method. This study proposes a theoretical and practical framework for post-project evaluation based on multi criteria appraisal. In particular, this study focuses on the foresrty extension project supported by Japan's technical assistance in Thailand.

Concluding remarks from the case are as follows. First, the framework with sustainability criteria and impact criteria is useful for post-project evaluation of social forestry based projects. Second, both school land and temple land planting are more suitable than general community land planting from the view point of effective afforested area management. Third, involving village head is useful to expand project results effectively at least in the northeastern part of Thailand. Forth, suitable extension method should be analyzed before project implementation. Fifth, agroforestry approach can be useful to extend project results widely and effectively.

This paper clarifies the education and training for first-line supervisors and their consequent attained ability in Japanese manufacturers in Thailand and, concentrating on the case of machine workshops. And it also compares Thailand's case with Japan's case. The aim of this analysis is to obtain some implications for improving supervisors' ability in Thailand.

After the introduction, previous researches on supervisors are reviewed, especially in relation to the introduction of “lean production system”. The next section deals with supervisors' ability and the way of training them in Japan. In the context of the comparison between mass and lean production systems, high productivity of Japanese supervisors has been explained by the fact that they are in charge of production control. Production control is executed on the basis of problem-solving ability (PSA) among others. In addition, PSA is classified into two different types, which consist of 1) directly-in-charge type of PSA and 2) management type of PSA. As for education and training in order to develop these PSAs, it is important for employees to get involved with managerial and engineering jobs.

After dealing with Japan's case, the paper examines Thailand's case, particularly in Japanese affiliated manufacturers, based on questionnaire and field survey. The result shows that directly-in-charge type of PSA has been learned well comparatively. However, the tasks which necessitate management type of PSA are not delegated to supervisors, which is dissimilar to Japan's case. In addition, Thai supervisors don't have the experience of managerial and engineering jobs.

This fact means that the “ceiling” of ability formation lies between two types of PSA. The next step should be to explain the reason for this difference, and it could be possible by focusing their contrasting ways of training supervisors. However, more research is necessary on the causal relationship between the way of training and the consequent attained ability, since this survey result is not sufficient.

Technical experts and volunteers sent overseas play an important role in international development projects. But they face many troubles in their works. This paper is intended as an investigation of obstructing factors which stand in the way of their lives and works overseas, seeking some measures which can be taken during training before dispatch and discusses the cultural-boundness of ourselves as Japanese nationals.

In previous studies on intercultural adaptation of people engaged in overseas cooperation, a great deal of research has been made on the relations between personal factors and psychological equilibrium. What seems to be lacking, however, is the influence of socio-cultural factors of sojourning countries and mother countries as well as dispatched individual whose behavior and thinking are culturally bound.

Data were collected by administrating the questionnaires to the JOCV members posted to 51 nations. Through the content analysis of open-ended questions, the obstructing factors are extracted and classified into 11 categories;

a) Language problems

b) Institutional problems

c) Co-workers' attitude toward work

d) Ambiguous significance of international cooperation

e) Lack of budget and hardware in workplace

f) Being foreigner or Japanese,

g) Sense of religion

h) Political and social problems

i) Lack of social and technical experience of JOCV members

j) Crisis management

k) Interactions with local nationals and Japanese

Most Japanese who work and live abroad share some of these problems and the others are long-standing hurdles for international cooperation works. If Japan seeks seriously to bring up human resource that can contribute to international development, an experience of JOCV must be intended to be one of the practical training as well as a meaningful experience for JOCV members.

China has already become the second largest country in the energy consumption. Increasing energy consumption involves an increase of CO₂ and SOx gas emissions. In this article, we estimate the environmental forecasting in China to apply of Environmental Kuznets Curve. Furthermore we analyze the effects of environmental countermeasure against air pollution. By using the input-output tables, we can analyze the forward linkage effects and the backward linkage effects in environmental countermeasure. In the forward linkage effects, the mining industry receives a strong effect. The backward linkage effects of any industrial section are negligible. These results of this article are instructive results for considering the future environmental situation in China.

This essay presents issues and prospects for conducting evaluation for aid projects and NGO activities. Evaluation is crucial to improving the quality of projects. Project evaluation should be implemented either after the end of the project or mid-term of the implementation stage. The results should be published to stakeholders for use in formulating new projects and as an information source for learning lessons.

In order to evaluate the performance of an implemented project, evaluators should first understand the contents of project correctly by filling in the Project Design Matrix (PDM). They should then measure the results of the PDM, using the following five criteria: efficiency, effectiveness, impact, relevance and sustainability.

Introducing a rating system would also be an effective measure for obtaining a more objective evaluation. Evaluators should use care in rating results, especially in comparing projects from different areas or fields.

The priority of criteria in evaluation depends on when the project is evaluated. In order to improve the quality of evaluations, professionals who are familiar with the method should collaborate with partners in host countries to prepare the evaluations. Beneficiary's participation in evaluating and improvement of host country's capacity for evaluation should be encouraged. In order to achieve the most from the evaluation process, the organization should be prepared to learn from the results and make any necessary changes according to the five criteria. If the purpose of the evaluation is to snow the projects performance to taxpayers or contributors, the evaluation results should be published as much as possible.