SOUTH KOREA AS A DONOR NATION

South Korea's ODA programs have been administered by more than one government agency (OECD 2012; Kim Reference Kim2016; Chung, Eom, and Jung Reference Chung, Eom and Jung2016; MOFAT 2012). The first of these was the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MOFAT), which was charged with overseeing South Korea's ODA programs to ensure that they were conducted in accordance with all applicable laws as well as with Seoul's diplomatic and security priorities. This means that MOFAT officials were more interested in using South Korean ODA for diplomatic purposes such as promoting the international goals of the country than for purely domestic interests (MOFAT 2012). In 1991, the MOFAT created the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) to manage all of South Korea's ODA that is distributed in the form of grants and to help ensure that grant aid and technical assistance programs effectively promote sustainable development in recipient nations. In 2011, MOFAT and KOICA were jointly responsible for 37 percent of South Korea's total Official Development Assistance disbursements.Footnote ⁸

The second agency that has been involved in the management of South Korea's ODA efforts was the Ministry of Strategy and Finance (MOSF), which was in charge of distributing all ODA in the form of loans. This agency sought to ensure that South Korea's ODA was effective at promoting international economic cooperation,Footnote ⁹ and it accomplished its supervision of ODA loans through South Korea's Export–Import Bank, which oversaw the nation's Economic Development Cooperation Fund (EDCF). What this means is that this agency's officials were most interested in using the nation's ODA to promote South Korea's economic development interests (Kim Reference Kim2016). In 2011, 42 percent of South Korea's total ODA was provided in the form of loans.

Finally, there are other government agencies that participated in the distribution of South Korean economic assistance, but this aid has remained around one-fifth of Korea's total disbursements. Most important would be the South Korean Presidency or the Blue House (Sohn and Yoo Reference Sohn and Yoo2015). The Blue House has influenced South Korea's distribution of ODA in three particular ways. Two are relatively minor and involve, first, adjudicating disputes between competing ODA agencies in terms of the amounts they can distribute and, second, the discretionary money the Blue House uses for specific international projects. Where the Blue House has most influence is in the overall approach South Korea will take in allocating economic assistance, particularly to its northern adversary, North Korea. We see that the current presidency of Moon Jae-In, as well as the presidencies of Kim Dae-Jung and Roh Mu-Hyun, have pursued the “Sunshine Policy,” which involves a more open approach to Pyongyang both diplomatically and in terms of offering aid for to enhance this more open diplomacy.

The first two sets of government agencies introduced competing ODA discourses, and this had led to tensions in the management of South Korea's ODA programs and, thus, difficulties in the coordination of its international giving. One of these competing discourses is what Kim (Reference Kim2016) called the “Intellectual Leadership” approach, which argued that, given South Korea's unique experience of moving from the position of recipient to economically developed donor, it should develop and implement ODA policies that are informed by this unique and important experience.Footnote ¹⁰ The other is identified as the “Ethical or Deferential Leadership” approach, or what other scholars have referred to as a “Strategic Followership” policy (Kim Reference Kim2016). This discourse recommends that South Korea should strive to be more in line with the international (DAC) norms, which would mean increasing the amounts it distributes, raising the share of untied aid, and focusing on becoming a priority donor to select countries so that transactions costs in its projects are reduced (See e.g., Oh Reference Oh2014).Footnote ¹¹ It also means not using its Official Development Assistance to reward nations that engage in human rights abuses and, thus, either reducing or eliminating aid to such nations.

The existence of these two institutionally based competing visions led to a lack of coordination in the management of South Korea's ODA efforts, and, while the involvement of the Blue House could mediate some of the disagreements, the country's ODA programs often proceeded with the principal institutional actors not coordinating their distributions. This problem was exacerbated by the lack of a government-sanctioned vision that focused all ODA programs on designated national priorities that would guide ODA agencies in their day-to-day operations, while being attentive to evolving ODA standards. To solve this agency competition problem and align ODA practices with those of DAC-member nations, the government of South Korea began issuing ODA policy documents that over time would lead to changes in its actual ODA practices. These policy documents highlight the reforms that the government would implement, and these reforms became more substantial as the amount of ODA that South Korea distributed grew (Chun, Munyi, and Lee Reference Chun, Munyi and Lee2010; OECD 2012).

According to OECD data, South Korea provided modest amounts of ODA as early as 1985.Footnote ¹² As the data in Figure 1 indicate, these amounts remained low and relatively stable until the 1990s when they experienced moderate increases. Growth in South Korea's economic assistance continued throughout this decade, but these amounts experienced near exponential increases after the turn of the turn of the century. The ODA reforms South Korean officials discussed implementing reflected two sets of goals, the first involved with complying with evolving international development assistance norms. This meant that South Korea would increase its disbursements to the world's poorest nations, paying more attention to local imperatives and recipient country participation when selecting countries for development partnership strategies. And it also meant moving aid away from nations that were involved in human rights abuses. At the same time, South Korea's ODA practices would maintain their commitment to showcasing their own country's development experience (OECD 2012; Kim, Kim, and Kim Reference Kim, Kim and Kim2013; Kim Reference Kim2016), which meant selecting countries that had the greatest potential to replicate its own development experience and serve Seoul's domestic economic development interests, specifically, countries in the Asian region.

Figure 1

South Korea's Gross ODA Disbursements

While there are numerous policy documents that highlight South Korea's path to the ODA reforms it implemented just after being elevated to DAC-membership, one of the most important earlier articulations of its evolving ODA principles is found in the “Seoul Development Consensus for Shared Growth,” which was followed by Korea's “Multi-Year Action Plan on Development.” Both of these plans were announced at the G20 Summit held in Seoul in 2010, which attests to the efforts of South Korean officials to help make the economic assistance efforts of fellow DAC members more beneficial to recipient nations.Footnote ¹³ There are six core principles contained in the “Seoul Development Consensus for Shared Growth,” and they find their genesis in proposals introduced by Korean officials at two G20 summits, the 2009 summit in London and the June 2010 one in Toronto.Footnote ¹⁴ Once these principles and action items were adopted at the G20 Summit in Seoul in November 2010, they effectively replaced the principles that were embedded in what has been known as the Washington Consensus.Footnote ¹⁵

The second document is the “Multi-Year Action Plan on Development” that listed one or more items to be implemented to accomplish development goals in nine target areas. There are nine implementation target areas, and South Korean officials offered both these six principles and nine implementation targets so that other recipient nations could have an improved development experience as aid recipients. In these documents, South Korea's ODA officials made it clear that balanced and sustainable development could occur only if ODA was distributed in a way that led to economic growth that was broadly shared among members of recipient countries’ populations. This meant that DAC members would have to continually evaluate their aid disbursements to ensure that their ODA efforts truly led to growth that was “strong, sustainable, and balanced.” On a more practical level, this led to recommendations that aid help increase aggregate demand in developing and, especially, low-income countries. This ODA goal was driven by the notion that such an outcome was possible only if donor nations worked harder to build relationships with aid recipients that were truly equitable.

The primary purpose of these internationally focused policy documents was to influence DAC-member practices in a way that reflected South Korea's own development experience, but South Korea was involved in a subsequent international agreement that reflected the parallel imperative of it being certain its ODA practices adhered to international norms. The reference here is to the “Busan Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation” promulgated at the 4th High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness held late in 2011 in South Korea.Footnote ¹⁶ While not antithetical to the principals and action items contained in the previous policy documents, the policies agreed to in the Busan Partnership are more comprehensive than those in the Seoul Development Consensus, and they required more reform action on the part of DAC-member nations.

Such actions would more directly affect which nations would be selected as aid recipients and what amounts of ODA they would receive. This is because the “Busan Partnership” encouraged increased donor–recipient cooperation, more attention to the world's least developed economies, and especially South–South and triangular cooperation efforts so that there can be more locally owned solutions to development problems that are contextually sensitive. In addition to a number of other recommendations as well as the human rights records of potential recipients, the Busan Partnership made policy changes that referred to providing finance to address the deleterious development impacts associated with climate change.

These international policy pronouncements provided clear indications that, in addition to promoting its own development experience, South Korea had committed itself to ensuring that its ODA disbursements were in accordance with current DAC standards. In spite of these commitments, South Korea still had other issues to address if it was to improve the quality of its ODA. In addition to increasing the amounts of money it would devote to its ODA programs, South Korea had to ensure that its distributions increasingly reflected the development needs of recipient countries by establishing individual Country Partnership Strategies (CPS). It would also have to correct the flaws its ODA programs showed in terms of uncoordinated management, so that its overall development assistance efforts could be more coherent in terms of the goals to which it would be directed. These issues were addressed with the passage of the Framework Act on International Development Cooperation and the issuance of a parallel Presidential Decree, stating that the content of this legislation would determine the goals of all ODA efforts and oversee the operation of all of South Korea's Official Development Assistance agencies. This legislation and parallel decree were implemented in July 2010 by President Lee Myung-Bak, who famously noted that “[i]t is more difficult to give aid than to receive it” (Kim Reference Kim2016, 260).

While President Lee's statement may be subject to interpretation, what is not in dispute was South Korea's commitment to reforming its ODA policies. The Framework Act first tackled the problem of competing agencies emphasizing different values in the distribution of South Korea's Official Development Assistance. As shown in the upper part of Table 1, the South Korean government had created the Committee for International Development Cooperation (CIDC) to coordinate the distribution of its ODA. While the CIDC had been in existence for more than a decade, its actual relationship to other South Korean ODA agencies and its specific management role was not made clear until the passage of the Framework Act. This act and accompanying Presidential Decree elevated the authority of the CIDC in the ODA process to that of apex agency, and what assisted in making the CIDC the highest authority in ODA matters was the composition of its governing board. The CIDC was to be chaired by the Prime Minister and, to ensure it would have sufficient expertise to guide the country's ODA activities, its membership consisted of fifteen sitting ministers, seven civilian experts, and the heads of KOICA and the Export-Import Bank.

Table 1

Institutional and Policy Changes Enacted with the Framework Act and Presidential Decree, 2010

Data From: Office of Government Policy Coordination.

The Framework Act and accompanying Presidential Decree also set out the principles that would guide all decisions on the distribution of South Korean ODA. These principles are listed in the lower portion of Table 1, and they reiterate many of the evolving guidelines that were contained in policy documents issued earlier, particularly those relating to ensuring that distributed ODA helped reduce poverty and promote sustainable development in recipient countries. The Framework Act also announced that there would be some newer principles that would guide the distribution of South Korean ODA from this time forward. As also indicated by the Table, these include promoting gender equality through the improvement of the human rights of women and children and the formulation of Country Partnership Strategies (CPS) that would ensure that ODA projects best serve the needs of countries that would receive South Korean ODA.

Like other donor countries, South Korea has a number of recipient countries that it has designated as priority partner countries. These countries were selected from a group of over 120 countries with which it had aid relationships, and they were selected for this special strategic aid relationship based on their own development plans as well as how these coincided with South Korea's overall Official Development Assistance strategy. A list of these countries, as of 2015, is provided in Table 2, and we see from the Table that the bulk of these nations are located in East, Southeast, and South Asia, suggesting some continuity of focus with the country's well established trading partners. We also see that while Asia is the most represented region in its priority partner portfolio, countries from this region still occupy less than half of all recipient nations with which South Korea has put together country partnership strategies. Africa had seven countries while Latin American and the Middle East/Central Asia had four and two respectively. Again, the importance of a Country Partnership Strategy (CPS) is its indication that South Korea would be careful to be sure its assistance was designed to meet the development needs of these priority recipients. For example, the Country Partnership Strategy with Vietnam notes that the goal of South Korean ODA is to help elevate it into a modern, industrial country, while that for Uganda emphasizes such things as comprehensive rural development, the development of health services, and technical and vocational education.Footnote ¹⁷

Table 2

South Korean Country Partnership Strategies (CPS)

Data From: Office for Government Policy Coordination.

POLICY CHANGE AND THE DISTRIBUTION OF SOUTH KOREAN ODA

Given the changes that were implemented in the institutions and policies that govern South Korean ODA practices, the question we must address is how these policy reforms affected actual distributions of South Korean Official Development Assistance. By distribution, we are referring to which countries were selected as recipient nations and what amounts of aid they were given; and to answer this question, we first note that there are studies that have tracked how South Korea's distribution of Official Development Assistance has changed over time.Footnote ¹⁸ Among the more notable is the analysis of data between 2005 and 2010 by Lee (Reference Lee2012), who tracked changes in Seoul's distribution patterns and also compared these changes to the average practices of DAC-member nations (Kim and Kim Reference Kim and Kim1992). This analysis was conducted over two pooled time periods, 2005–2007 and 2008–2010 and in three substantive areas, including a breakdown of South Korea's disbursements by the income level of recipient nations. Lee's (Reference Lee2012) results indicate that the share of South Korean ODA received by nations in the two lowest income categories increased by 20 percent between these two time periods, revealing an increased commitment to DAC norms and principles.

Another study conducted by Oh, Song, and Yim (Reference Oh, Song and Yin2015) compared South Korea's disbursements to those of Greece. Their analysis showed that, while there were expectations for South Korea's disbursements to be different from those of Greece, there were many similarities. These included a persistence of aid to each's principal trading partners as well as some changes in disbursement patterns given the different international contexts each faced.Footnote ¹⁹ There have been other studies of South Korea's ODA disbursements that have looked at partisan influences. Specifically, Sohn and Yoo (Reference Sohn and Yoo2015) found that, while there were differences in the priorities of South Korea's conservative versus progressive governments, there were some interesting surprises. The most unexpected finding was that the progressive governments of Kim Dae-Jung and Roh Moo-Hyun were more responsive to international pressures concerning security issues than were their conservative counterparts. Chung, Munyi, and Lee (Reference Chun, Munyi and Lee2010) investigated those factors that help explain the changing proportions of tied versus untied aid in South Korea's portfolio, while Oh (Reference Oh2014) investigated those general factors that help explain its overall effectiveness.

While the data- and case-based studies have all contributed to our understanding of the characteristics of South Korean ODA and how its actual disbursements have changed, we still have an incomplete picture of the how the policy changes discussed above changed the actual distribution of South Korean Official Development Assistance, making it more consistent with international norms. Because of this, our task is to investigate if the policy changes implemented by the South Korean government led to more ODA going to poor countries, increased amounts of aid to countries that were selected for individual Country Partnership Strategies, and less help for nations that engaged in human rights abuses. Confirming these changes in South Korea's actual disbursements of Official Development Assistance would tell us that the principles in the Framework Act were clearly embedded in South Korea's ODA distribution practices. Again, while the existing literature has elevated our understanding of South Korea's ODA programs, it still contains gaps, and there are a number of reasons these questions have not been answered adequately.

First, many analyses were based on a mapping of South Korea's ODA disbursements that covered limited periods of time, making it difficult if not impossible to determine just how the policy changes enacted in recent years altered South Korean ODA practices. Next, many analyses of the changes that occurred in South Korean ODA were prescriptive, which means they covered only certain functional areas and left important indicators of where South Korean ODA actually went and in what amounts neither identified nor evaluated. Finally, all of the data-based analyses of South Korean ODA disbursements we discussed above involved some level of selection bias simply because they took for granted the countries that South Korean officials would target as ODA recipients. In other words, they did not accurately model the ODA decision process, which occurs in two stages, one in which a country is selected as a recipient and a second in which a decision is made with respect to the amount and type of ODA it will receive.

In light of these issues, our empirical task then is to fill these temporal and analytic gaps and conduct an analysis that shows clearly whether and to what extent the ODA policy changes enacted by the government since South Korea achieved DAC membership have led to notable changes in the distribution patterns its ODA manifests. Specifically, we want to know if the world's poorest countries were selected more often as recipients, if those that became priority partners and participated more ODA funded projects received larger amounts of ODA than those that did not, and if nations with human rights abuses on their respective records were less likely to be selected as recipients and received lower amounts of aid.

In addition to evaluating these factors, we also want to be able to determine whether there was persistence in older practices, such as being more generous to Asian nations and trading partners, or whether these older practices were reduced in the wake of the implementation of the above-discussed policy changes. As we mentioned throughout this article, we can accomplish these tasks only by ensuring that the ODA decision process is appropriately modelled and explanatory factors are included that accurately capture the changes that we expect ODA policy changes to produce. The analysis we conduct below will have these features and will be accomplished by the use of dyadic data to estimate a statistical model that will allow us to weight all relevant factors that have influenced the changing patterns of South Korea's ODA disbursements, particularly in recent years, while controlling for factors that indicate the persistence of older practices.

The discussion provided thus far has mentioned briefly our expectations about how the implemented ODA policy changes should have altered the distribution of South Korean ODA over time, that is, the probability of certain nations being selected as recipients and how much assistance selected recipients would then receive. We will discuss these expectations in more detail below, but we note first that we also have expectations about what patterns this distribution should manifest prior to these policy changes. In the first two to three decades after the end of the Korean War, South Korea was driven by very strong development imperatives, and, as a result, we would expect its disbursement patterns to be heavily reflective of its own domestic economic development policies. This means that the distribution of South Korea's ODA should be skewed in favor of those nations with which it began its bilateral trading relations in the post-armistice period. With the exception of the United States and its NATO allies, this was first Japan and then other nations in the Asia-Pacific region.

Naturally, as the economy of South Korea grew and the amounts it distributed increased, we would expect that South Korea's ODA disbursements would become more regionally diversified, manifesting growth in areas outside of the Asian region, and also include more lower-income nations as recipients. Parallel with these changes, as we approached the end of the twentieth century and South Korea began developing the principles on which its ODA policy changes would be based, its ODA disbursements should more closely to reflect those of DAC norms. Specifically, we expect more nations outside of Asia and South Korea's trade networks to be selected as recipients and be extended larger shares of ODA. We also expect that the world's least developed economies would be increasingly selected as recipient nations and receive larger shares of South Korean Official Development Assistance. At the same time, if South Korean implemented the policy changes it enacted to move closer to international norms, we would also expect its disbursements to reflect a growing distance from nations that would be labeled as being human rights abusers.

We begin our effort to calibrate the impacts of the ODA policy changes discussed above with a discussion of the variable to be explained, the nations that were selected as ODA recipients and then the amounts of Official Development Assistance they received.

DISCUSSION: CONTINUITY AND CHANGE IN SOUTH KOREA'S ODA DISBURSEMENTS

Results are presented in Table 3, and they involve estimations of three models, one for the pre-policy-change period (1987–2009), one for the post-policy-change period (2010–2016), and the third for the entire period covered by our data series, to serve as an overall check. Also, given that we used the Heckman Selection procedure to estimate our three models, the results we present in the Table are divided into two stages. The first stage is the selection stage where the dependent variable is whether or not a nation in a dyad was selected as a recipient of South Korean Official Development Assistance. These results are presented in the upper half of the Table. Results for the second stage are presented in the lower half of the Table. These are the outcome results, where the dependent variable is the amount of Official Development Assistance that South Korea delivered to those countries that were selected as recipients in the first stage of the estimation procedure.

Table 3

South Korea's ODA Disbursement Patterns Pre- and Post-Policy-Change: Heckman Selection Model

We note here that not all of the factors that we discussed above are presented in Table 3. As we pointed out in that discussion, we included several explanatory factors in our models to be certain we had adequate measures of all influences we wanted our models to calibrate, as well as to be certain that we included an adequate number of controls so as to avoid omitted variable bias. A few of these particular variables were statistically insignificant in the estimates of our models, and to be certain they added to the explanatory power of the models overall, we performed parameter encompassing tests.Footnote ²⁶ The results of these tests revealed that some of these statistically insignificant variables did not add to the explanatory power of the models, which allowed us to rerun the models without them and then eliminate them from being presented in Table 3.Footnote ²⁷

Comparing results presented in columns 1 and 2 in Table 3, we see that the signs and statistical significance of the coefficients on our variables in these two columns are by and large unchanged. We also note that the size of the coefficients on many variables across the two time periods, particularly those factors that we included to reveal the impact of policy change on South Korea's ODA disbursements, were substantially different in many cases. This was expected and tells us that, overall, South Korea's ODA policy reforms had a significant impact on which nations would receive assistance and in what amounts. There are a number of indicators of policy change that we expected to have a significant impact on the distribution of South Korea's ODA disbursements, and four of the coefficients on these factors revealed a greater substantive impact in the post-policy-change period compared to the previous time period. Coefficient estimates on other factors included in our models proved to be both statistically insignificant and substantively unimportant.

Concerning variables that were statistically significant and substantively important, the first is our measure of Country Partnership Strategies (CPS), which were statistically significant at both the selection and outcome stages, and, in accordance with our expectations, revealed much larger substantive impacts in the post-policy-change period. We observe from the results in Table 3 that this was particularly true for the selection stage of the process because, while South Korea had ODA relationships with some of these nations, others represented newer development relationships. Being one of South Korea's priority partnership countries also mattered for the amount of ODA support a nation would receive, something that was indicated by the post-reform period's coefficient being nearly double that of the earlier time period. These differences exist because South Korea's Country Partnership Strategies have been tailored to the specific development needs of each of these individual countries, leading these recipients to obtain much more ODA than non-CPS countries.

The next two factors we examine are whether a recipient nation has been characterized by human rights abuses and whether or not a recipient was designated as a post-disaster country. Being a post-disaster country significantly raised the probability of being selected as a recipient of South Korean ODA, and this was true for the post-policy-reform period only. This tell us that the ODA reforms implemented by the South Korean government had a direct impact on disbursements by substantially raising the probability that a post-disaster nation would be selected as an ODA recipient. Coefficients on the impact of being designated as a nation with a poor human rights record, however, did not indicate a positive impact of South Korea's policy reforms, and this is true for both countries that would be selected as ODA recipients as well as for how much ODA they would receive. The results in Table 3 indicate that the impact of being an abuser of human rights had no impact on how much ODA a nation would receive as indicated by the statistically insignificant coefficients produced by the estimates. In addition to this, results for the selection part of the process tell us that being a human rights abuser raised the probability of being targeted as a recipient, particularly in the post-reform period. This suggests that the impact of South Korea's ODA reforms may have not been comprehensive, but this result can be explained as a problem of supply – specifically, the fact that the lower income countries to be selected as recipients, as prescribed by international norms and South Korea's ODA reforms, were also nations that had relatively poor human rights records.Footnote ²⁸

We also noted in our discussion above that one of the guiding principles put into place by the Framework Act was that South Korean ODA should positively impact gender equality by promoting the human rights of women and children. Because of this, we wanted to capture this impact and added the gender equality index from the International Monetary Fund. If promoting the human rights of women and children was made a part of South Korean ODA disbursements, we would expect this variable to be statistically and substantively significant but with a sign in the negative direction and mostly in the post-policy-change period. However, the inclusion of this variable in our model estimations resulted in a challenge for our analysis, in that Gender Equality Index data are available for different time periods than those covered in our original analysis, specifically, from 1990 to 2013. In spite of this, we did estimate an abbreviated panel with this measure, where the signs were in the expected direction but the coefficient was statistically insignificant. We then performed the parameter encompassing tests, which indicated that including this measure improved the fit of the models for the abbreviated period of time for which this index was available. As a result, we present the results of estimating our models with this variable included in Appendix 1.Footnote ²⁹

The explanatory factors we have examined thus far tell us that there was both continuity and change in South Korea's ODA practices in that, while new nations that matched international criteria were identified and received increased ODA amounts as recipients, South Korea's traditional recipients continued to receive ODA and many in increased amounts, even in the post-reform period. When we examine coefficient estimates for the economic factors that we included in our models, we see that this result is reinforced. Specifically, results in Table 3 tell us that the influence of our economic factors suggest that the ODA policy reforms enacted by the South Korean government did result in changed practices that more closely adhered the international norms but, at the same time, led to the continuity of old practices that tell us South Korea continues to use its ODA to serve its domestic economic interests.

Concerning change in South Korea's ODA practices, our first economic factor is the per capita GDP of a recipient nation, and the second is whether or not a recipient nation was designated as one of the world's least developed economies. We expected being designated as one of the world's least developed nations would be important in the selection of that nation as an ODA recipient and also in terms of how much it would receive in South Korean ODA. This is particularly true for the post-reform period, and the results in Table 3 support this conclusion, albeit in a nuanced way. In the pre-reform period, being among the world's least developed economies reduced the probability of being a recipient nation for South Korean ODA, and it also reduced the amounts of ODA a recipient nation was likely to obtain if selected. However, in the post-reform period, these coefficients remained negative, but their coefficients were statistically insignificant. What this means is that the negative relationship between being designated as a least developed economy and the probability of being selected as a recipient and the amounts selected nations would obtain existed in the pre-reform period, but this relationship did not obtain for the post-reform period. In other words, South Korea's ODA reforms eliminated the bias that had existed against poorer nations after the government implemented its ODA reforms in 2010.

Another economic factor we used to test the impact of South Korea's ODA reforms on how it actually distributed its economic assistance concerned a recipient's per capita GDP. Overall, we expected that the probability of being selected as a recipient, as well as the amount of ODA a nation would receive, would be inversely related to a country's per capita GDP. This is because if the policy reforms implemented as part of the Framework Act were indeed meaningful we should witness a more pronounced negative relationship in the post-reform period. The results presented in Table 3 confirm this, particularly with respect to being selected as a recipient nation in the first place. We see from the data in the Table that the probability of being selected as a recipient nation declined as a country's per capita GDP increased, but we also see that this relationship was more than doubled in the post-reform period. This is the result we expected, and when we take this together with the other coefficients from the selection part of the process, we can confirm that the policy reforms implemented in 2010 did affect which nations were selected as ODA recipients and how much they would get from South Korea in assistance.Footnote ³⁰

While these results make it clear that South Korea's implemented ODA policy changes were meaningful in terms of how they affected which nations would be selected as aid recipients and how much assistance they would receive, the results also reveal that the positive impacts policy change had did not erase all of the continuities that existed in South Korea's ODA practices. We see from Table 3 that being a nation in the Asian region was advantageous in being selected as a recipient nation and that this was true for both the pre- and post-policy-change periods.Footnote ³¹ Moreover, we see from the results presented in Table 3 that being a nation that traded with South Korea remained an important factor, and this was true for both being selected as a recipient nation and for how much ODA that recipient would receive. What is also interesting about this result is that trading with South Korea was important but consistently important across the pre- and post-policy-change periods. In fact trade was slightly less important in determining how much ODA a recipient would receive but slightly more important in a nation being selected as a recipient in the post-policy-change period. These continuities tell us that implementing changes in ODA policy that come with the intended impacts on which nations South Korea would choose as recipients and how much assistance they would then receive does not mean that initial ODA distribution preferences would be eliminated because old practices persisted side by side with the distinct changes South Korea meant to implement to coincide more with international norms.

Overall, the analysis presented above tells us that, as a donor nation, South Korea has not only altered the policies that govern its ODA disbursements, but more importantly the policies changes it has implemented have had identifiable impacts on which nations would be selected as recipients and how much Official Development Assistance they would receive. This is important because the analysis provided here reveals clearly that, in the case of South Korea, reform policies have affected practices, but, at the same time, this is also important because successful change in practices does not mean that South Korea's ODA is now distributed in obeisance only to its reform imperatives.

This has been made clear in our analysis of the South Korean case, but there are still additional questions that future research can and should address. Specifically, future research can provide greater insight into which types of Official Development Assistance, loans versus grants and bilateral versus multilateral, better serve the ends South Korea has elevated as its guiding principles. Moreover, the existence of Country Partnership Strategies provides a clearer basis on which to conduct evaluations of the actual impact of ODA in recipient nations. These will have to be the topics of future research, but we do hope that this research has provided a basis upon which this research can proceed.