International Norms and Japanese Foreign Aid

Do norms influence Japan’s foreign aid? Japan’s aid policy statements have increasingly emphasized humanitarian and democratic values, but few studies demonstrate a shift in Japan’s aid policy that reflects this changing discourse. In this study, I seek to determine if Japan’s foreign aid commitments increasingly reflect normative factors or continue to be allocated based on commercial or security considerations. The results indicate that humanitarian and democratic values had very little influence on Japan’s foreign aid commitments over the entire analysis period. Contrary to conventional wisdom, commercial benefits had little importance before 1992 and are a significant factor only during the 1992–2001 period. Security considerations are strong predictors during the Cold War period and are even more significant after 2001 when Japan’s foreign aid became increasingly aligned with US security policies. Further, Japan has not substantially increased the share of its aid to “soft” sectors or disaster response, but it has adopted the international norm of debt relief for highly indebted poor countries and shifted a substantial amount of foreign aid from infrastructure lending to debt forgiveness.