The world’s largest donor of ODA during the 1990s, Japan, is now making substantial cuts. ODA decreased by three per cent for the fiscal year ending March 2002 and for the coming year another ten percent cut will be made. This is an attempt to improve the situation of the Japanese state budget...

Peace building and peace preservation are new key concepts in Japanese foreign aid policy. According to the revision of the ODA charter in 2003, the objective of Japan’s foreign aid is to contribute to the peace and development of the international community, and thereby to help ensure...

The main part of Japanese aid is directed to Asia and there has been a strong emphasis on economic infrastructure, that is building railways, roads and ports etc. Recently however there is a refocusing towards environmental aid and “softer” types of aid such as poverty alleviation and social...

The development of newspapers in Japan and Sweden follow radically different paths. The newspapers fulfilled quite different roles in the two countries and were to an extensive degree reflecting the societies in which they were produced. This paper will start by giving a short overview of the...

The general aim of this paper is to review structural factors in Japan’s domestic and international context that are driving changes in Japan’s civil society. The opening up of the Japanese market and the globalization of the world economy, the information revolution and technology...

At the moment, very substantial reforms in the field of security are being undertaken in Japan. “The New National Defence Program Guidelines for 2005 and After”, as well as the “Midterm Defence Program Fiscal Year 2005-2009” both talk about a thorough restructuring of the Self Defence...

In Mongolia with 2.5 million inhabitants, population density is extremely low. It has a sever climate. Three quarters of the countries territory are grasslands, with the remaining area being deserts or mountain areas. This description does not depict Mongolia as a very attractive place, but...

In light of an increased focus, in Japanese diplomacy since the turn of the millennium, on the need for strengthening democracy and human rights within ASEAN, this paper examines Japanese Official Development Assistance (ODA) to ASEAN during the 21st century in order to understand if Japan has...

This paper re-assesses the prospects for greater monetary integration in Asia in the wake of the Asian financial crisis of 1997. The Asian crisis highlighted the absence of well-developed supranational institutions in Asia to provide early warning signals of impending currency or balance of...

This paper suggests that the use of investment incentives focusing exclusively on foreign firms, although motivated in some cases from a theoretical point of view, is generally not an efficient way to raise national welfare. The main reason is that the strongest theoretical motive for financial...