ABSTRACT
This concluding chapter deals with three basic questions based on the case studies of the four Asian donors: China, India, Korea, and Japan. Their experiences can be expected to shed new light on the debates over the evolution of emerging donors. First, how and why did aid recipients transform into donors? The prevailing view that an aid recipient begins to give aid after attaining sufficient economic capacity does not seem to reflect the reality, as there are many middle-income and low-income donors who are also receiving aid. China and India, two major emerging donors, were still classified as “low-income” countries by the World Bank in the early twenty-first century. Korea was one of the poorest nations when it started aid giving in the 1960s. Japan’s per capita GNP was lower than Cuba, Lebanon, Malaya, and the Union of South Africa when it started technical cooperation in 1954 (Okun and Richardson 1961: 234-235). All of these countries were aid recipients when they launched their aid programs. Under these circumstances, detailed empirical studies are required to show how a developing country explores aid giving. Second, how can the Asian emerging donors contribute to the global development agenda? Virtually all of these Asian donors propose approaches that are different from the prevailing aid strategy of the international aid community, a nexus between the advanced Development Assistance Committee (DAC) member countries and the international development institutions. How are these alternative views beneficial to developing countries? Third, what kinds of roles can the emerging donors play in the international aid community? This is a hot issue among the traditional donors, as “a different philosophy of development co-operation (of the emerging donors) is progressively gaining momentum,” while their aid approaches are significantly different from the mainstream idea (Saidi and Wolf 2011). Although it may be naïve to think that the emerging donors’ behavior would finally coalesce with the “foreign aid regime,” many traditional donors regard the recent boost of new donors as a serious challenge.
