Examining "Softness" in Japan's ODA Program

Until recently, Japan's ODA has been seen as hard oriented, that is centering on economic and industrial infrastructure projects. However, there has been a growing recognition of the need to provide more soft aid, especially to the less developed countries. Soft aid aims to enhance human resources and systems, and includes social sector development. Soft aid is needed more at first because the less developed countries need to prepare their people and social systems before they can make good use of hard aid. In contrast more developed countries can better utilize the economic infrastructures provided by hard aid to grow further economically. With this background, Japan formulated the ODA Charter in 1992 to express its commitment to providing more effective aid by an increased focus on soft aid. In this thesis, the content of Japan's ODA in the 1983-1985 period and the 1995-1997 period is examined, country by country, to see whether the new policy direction can be observed in the data. A scale to rate the softness of the projects was formulated, and this was used to evaluate the ODA projects conducted in the countries studied. The results of the rating are shown on graphs. The graphs show that there is no strong correlation between a country's development stage and the types of aid it received. It also shows that on the whole Japan gave more soft aid in the latter period across the board, without regard to the recipient country's relative GNP figures. Less developed countries did not receive relatively more soft aid.