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We have often argued that South Korea might gain from channeling at least some portion of its official assistance to the DPRK through multilateral routes. Bilateral assistance to the North will always be a component of the South’s policy. But there are economies to be reaped by working through the multilaterals as well as advantages to be had from depoliticizing aid ties.
The recent decision by South Korea’s MOU to approve medical aid to North Korea and Catherine Bertini’s appeal to the United States and South Korea to resume contributions to the WFP got us thinking of the broader picture. What is South Korea doing with respect to official development assistance (ODA) more generally? How does the DPRK fit into that record? The answers surprised us. In the first of this two part post, we look at the overall ODA record; in the second, we focus more closely on the North Korean component.
Figure 1 shows trends in total South Korean ODA, plus and minus humanitarian assistance to North Korea, which is not included in the ODA numbers that Seoul reports to the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee. The North Korean numbers include both outright grants and aid provided in the form of food and fertilizer. Food aid was nominally provided through loans, although no one really had any expectation that the South would get paid back.
Seoul got into the broader aid game gradually over the course of the 1980s and established the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) in 1991.
At the onset of the Kim Dae Jung administration South Korea already provided .05% of gross national income (GNI) in aid. Since 1970, the development policy community—and the developing countries—have sought to establish .7% of GNP/GNI as a de facto target for donors. Smaller countries—particularly the Nordics—tend to meet or exceed the target and larger countries--notably the US—ignores it. Clearly, South Korea is a newcomer.
Once aid got cranked up to the North after 2000, it remained surprisingly constant, slightly below .04% of GNI under the remainder of the DJ and Roh Moo Hyun presidencies. Aid to the North was well below ODA totals for the rest of the world. ODA fell in 2000 as a share of GNI but has generally shown an upward trend, spiking in 2005 as a result of projects in Iraq.
Trends shifted under the LMB government, of course. Aid to North Korea fell but Korea’s overall ODA rose, a component of South Korea’s effort to cut a wider swath on the international stage. In the 2008 DAC special review, South Korea laid down a marker that assistance to the “northern areas”—although not in the form of official ODA—should be taken into consideration when assessing the country’s overall aid effort. When South Korea became a member of the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) in November 2010, development assistance increased to .12% of GNI, still well short of the .7% target but rising. A new study out of the SAIS Korea shop looks at the future of Korean ODA. But the earlier claims about efforts with respect to the North no longer hold, as aid to Pyongyang has been cut.
Next time, a closer look at the North Korean piece of the puzzle.
