Five years after gaining entry into the Overseas Economic Cooperation and Development’s aid donor club, South Korea remains firmly on course to increasing its official development assistance. But it is also set on aligning its aid agency’s operations more closely with its national policy.
In 2013, the Asian donor disbursed $1.74 billion in net ODA, which accounted for just 0.13 percent of its GNI that year. Seoul intends to grow its development assistance to 2.38 trillion Korean won ($2.2 billion) this year, up 10 percent from 2014’s $2 billion in ODA — a modest figure in real terms compared to other aid donors, like the United States and Japan, but one of the biggest in terms of growth rate.
It will not be able to meet its goal of growing its aid to more than 0.25 of gross national income by the end of this year, however — the target Seoul set for itself when it became a member of the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee. The global target for all OECD-DAC members is 0.7 percent of GNI. Only a handful of European countries have met this demanding figure, including Luxembourg and Denmark.