Kim examines the impact of domestic politics in accomplishing South Korea’s middle power diplomacy through the provision of foreign aid. Since the 2000s, the rise of emerging nations as donors has brought about a remarkable transition in the international development community. South Korea has closed the gap with other Development Assistance Committee donors in terms of the quality of its aid. In doing so it has taken on a more active role as a middle power, acting as an agenda-setter and a mediator in the field of development and many other wide policy areas including trade, finance, environment, security, and peacekeeping. What factors, then, have encouraged South Korea to maintain and enhance the existing international development system? Not only how they behave, but also how their behaviour is determined is essential to truly understand the impact of emerging donors on the existing order. Kim highlights the significance of domestic politics in determining South Korea’s foreign aid behaviour, framing it in terms of South Korea’s wider middle power diplomatic strategy. This book will be of great value to scholars of South Korean politics and foreign policy, as well as to international relations scholars with an interest in the foreign aid policy of middle powers.

South Korea has experienced new challenges both internally and externally with respect to its foreign policies. Internally, democratization has changed political terrain for domestic and international politics. Democratization and the information revolution have reinvigorated civic life and citizens have become active in expressing very divergent and often polarized views on foreign policies. Democratization also promotes South Korean nationalism. Rising nationalist sentiments make it difficult for the U.S. to effectively handle regional security-related issues such as the North Korean nuclear program, balancing against China, and dealing with the potential Sino-Japanese conflict. Externally, globalization has brought significant changes to South Korea’s foreign policies. Economic dimension and issues rather than security-related issues become salient and important. For example, although security concerns are still dominant in Korean society, economic interests necessitate South Korea improve its relations with China and redefine its political position between the U.S. and China. Globalization has also promoted Korea’s national interests to reach out to other countries. The Korean government has tried to develop new economic partnerships with developing countries for the purpose of securing energy and natural resources and expanding its soft power. Economic globalization and democratization have brought about changes in South Korea that raise many interesting questions with respect to foreign policy. Has South Korea’s rise as an economic power and a democracy changed its relationship with neighboring powers? Does economic integration between South Korea and China reshape their relationship? How about its impact on U.S.-Korea relations? Are geopolitical and security-related concerns still the dominant factor in explaining South Korea’s foreign policies? Does economic integration between Korea and Japan help to reduce tensions or emotional animosities that derive from historical disputes? Has South Korea, as a growing economic power, sought to forge relations with other middle or small powers beyond the confines of its region? Overall, this book theoretically and empirically explores how democratization and economic globalization have changed domestic politics in South Korea and reshaped its foreign policies.

This book compares the rapid development of South Korea over the past 70 years with selected countries in sub-Saharan Africa to assess what factors contributed to the country’s success story, and why it is that countries that were comparable in the past continue to experience challenges in achieving and sustaining economic growth. In the 1950s, South Korea’s GDP per capita was $876, roughly comparable with that of Cote d’Ivoire and somewhat below Ghana’s. The country’s subsequent transformation from a war-ravaged, international aid-dependent economy to the 13th largest economy in the world has been the focus of considerable international admiration and attention. But how was it that South Korea succeeded in multiplying its GDP per capita by a factor of 23, while other Less Developed Countries continue to experience challenges? This book compares South Korea’s politics of development and foreign assistance with that of Ghana, Nigeria, and Zambia, which were also major recipients of the U.S. aid, to investigate the specific contexts that made it possible for South Korea to achieve success. Overall, this book argues that effective state capacity in South Korea’s domestic and international politics provided an anchor for diplomatic engagement with donors and guided domestic political actors in the effective use of aid for economic development. This book will be of interest to researchers and students working on development, comparative political economy, and foreign aid, and to policy makers and practitioners looking for a greater understanding of comparative development trajectories.

Japan's Foreign Aid Policy in Africa seeks to evaluate TICAD's intellectual contribution to and its development practices regarding Africa over the past 20 years. A central conclusion is that, while TICAD bureaucrats lacked agency to support Japanese companies in Africa, the model of emerging powers partnerships has expanded in Africa.

Current debates on emerging powers as foreign aid donors often fail to examine the myriad geopolitical, geoeconomic and geocultural tensions that influence policies of Official Development Assistance (ODA). This book advocates a regional geopolitical approach to explaining donor-donor relationships and provides a multidisciplinary critical assessment of the contemporary debates on emerging powers and foreign aid, bringing together economic and geopolitical approaches in the light of the 2015 completion of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Moving away from established debates assessing the advantages and disadvantages of foreign aid, this book challenges the current geopolitical assumptions of the emerging powers concerning issues such as 'south-south' solidarity, shared development experience and 'multipolarity'. It analyses how donor governments 'sell' aid to recipients through enabling different cultural assumptions and soft power narratives of national identity and provides empirical evidence on agendas such as aid effectiveness, aid for trade, public-private partnerships, and green growth aid. The book examines the role of, and relationships between, the leading traditional and emerging power Asian donors specifically, and explores the different and contested perspectives and patterns of ODA policy through an alternative account of emerging power foreign aid to leading African and Asian recipients. This book provides a valuable resource for postgraduate students and practitioners across disciplines such as development economics and geopolitics of development, uniquely approaching the debate from the perspective of emerging powers and donors.

After having been a Japanese colony for more than 35 years until 1945, the miraculous economic development in the southern half of the Korean peninsula has multiplied the nation's output nearly 38 times and expanded per capita income by 16 times from $778 to $12,422 (in year 2000 prices) and transformed from basically an agrarian economy to that of a major industrial power, which is now considered one of a dozen or so of most industrialized countries in the world, during the 43-year period between 1953 and 1996. This book is a study of development of the South Korean economy from the time of the cessation of the Korean War to date, based on available data with minimal historical description, focusing on investment, the sources and means of capital formation, which is one of the most critical factors that contributed to economic development, and the government role of in them for economic growth and structural changes. The approach in this study is more analytical (without being mathematical, statistical, or technical, but with supporting quantitative data) than historical. There are a number of studies on some aspects of capital formation and economic development in short articles, but there is no comprehensive study/analysis/book of capital formation and economic development of South Korea since the Korean War, other than this authors comprehensive study of capital formation and economic transformation of Korea before 1945 (1876-1945). Not only this book fills the void of study of the subject after the Korean War but it also complement my first volume. This study reveals a number of significant, though perhaps not all unique, patterns and characteristics of capital formation and economic development of South Korea. The combination of circumstances, approaches, and experiences in the country was in many respects unique in comparison to many developing and developed countries, including many Asian countries, such as Japan and China.

This book examines international aid in North Korea, in particular the ongoing policy of withholding aid, through the lens of the impact on the general population to present an argument for sustainable development. Focusing on the human rights of North Koreans and presenting a case for the use of aid as a provision for social change, it explores an alternative narrative to the existing long-drawn-out rhetoric of ‘denuclearisation-first’. The book’s scope includes evaluations of the causes of international sanctions and their impact, the Kim regime’s mitigation of sanctions through marketisation and a digital economy as well as barriers to aid monitoring and the reason for the absence of any mass anti-regime movement. It also posits that North Korea is a fragile state but cloaked by the image of a strong regime. The book succinctly demonstrates that the key to unlocking the potential of North Korea’s ‘cloaked society’ does not lie in sanctions, but is to be found in engagement with development aid. As such it will appeal to students of Korean Studies, Development Studies, Asian Politics and International Relations. Chapters 1 and 7 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.