Determinants of Korean Education Aid

Abstract

before and after era of South Korea as an official member of OECD DAC. The limitation of the study is that as South Koreas aid allocation itself fluctuates throughout the period, it will only be possible to see a general and overall view of its aid. Though the study will be able to provide insights of how South Koreas education aid behaved and should behave in the context of donor-interest and recipient need despite its limitation. It will also contribute to filling the gap in the aid literature on aid effectiveness and its determinants by sectoral and country level.

South Korea is one of the few countries to transform from an aid recipient country to an aid providing country that has received attention from the international aid society since 2009. It has been eight years since South Korea has become a member of the OECDs Development Assistance Committee(DAC) and actively assumed its role as a donor. South Korea is particularly well-known for its characteristic experience and emphasis on providing aid based on its core strengths. Despite such glamourous appearance and overwhelming attention among aid society, many concerns regarding aid performance arise for newly emerging donors such as South Korea. Though, studies conducted by South Korea are very little and when it comes to sector approach, it is even scarce. In the era of post-2015, it will be necessary to access South Koreas donor behavior in order to achieve the Sustainable Developmental Goals (SDGs) by providing empirical analysis of its aid allocation. Therefore, this study aims to understand how aid is distributed to particular recipients, especially its core sector

education aid. The prior purpose of this study is to find out whether South Koreas education aid is allocated accordingly to recipient countries educational needs. Then, the study aims to examine which factors are most influential upon the decision process in allocating education aid. This study will be conducted by empirically examining South Koreas education aid commitment to 85 recipient countries during the period of 2006 to 2014 with data extracted from the OECD Creditor Reporting System (CRS). The Tobit model is used with variables selected based on the Donor-Interest and Recipient Need model. Lastly, South Koreas education aid allocation will be reviewed by examining the total aid, different educational levels and two distinctive periods