Bilateral Aid In Japan

Japan is a world’s top contributor of Official Development Assistance (ODA). ODA refers to the socioeconomic cooperation and support to developing countries by governments, international organizations, non-governmental organization (NGOs), and groups.

Foreign aid was subject to many changes since the end of the Second World War. The developed countries, especially the ones from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), have started to allocate their ODA through two main channels: the bilateral aid channel and the multilateral aid channel. According to the OECD , bilateral aid “represents flows from official (government) sources directly to official sources in the recipient country” while multilateral aid “represents

After paying the war reparations, Japan’s reserves of ODA continued to increase at a high rate. In 1991, Japan was the first ODA donor worldwide. Now, one could ask why would Japan spend so much money and efforts to support socially and economically developing countries. After Japan’s defeat in 1945, the country established a new constitution. However, Japan’s new constitution had many limitations and a good example of this limitation is the use of its Japanese Defense Forces (JDF) even though today the reinterpretation of Article 9 is allowing the Japanese government to deploy more freely its JDF, but this is another debate. Therefore, Japan’s ODA was and still is one of its major tool to weigh its presence in the international sphere. Aid, a sharp and powerful foreign policy tool for the

However, DAC members and non-DAC countries are allocating more and more aid through the multilateral system. We could thus ask ourselves – by comparing the advantages and disadvantages of multilateral aid and bilateral aid – why multilateral aid has been increasing.

Japan’s ODA contribution: helping others or helping itself?

Japan became the number one ODA contributor worldwide in 1989. Japan surpassed all the countries (DAC members) from 1993 to 2000. However, since 2001, the country’s ODA contribution has fallen gradually. The year 2005 saw a temporary increase of Japan’s contribution.

In 2011, Japan’s total contributions were of $10 604.4 million. This total contributions include Japan’s bilateral ODA of $6 262.4 million and Japan’s multilateral ODA of $4 342 million. For the same year, Japan was the fifth contributor of the DAC members behind the United States, Germany, The United Kingdom and France. However, these numbers only take into account the total amount of contributions, but not the proportion of ODA to Japan’s gross national income (GNI). In 2011, Japan’s ODA was of 0.18% of its GNI that is to say that Japan was ranked 212t among the 23 DAC countries. In the same year, Sweden was ranked first with 1.02% of its