Learning through Localizing International Transfers: South Korea’s Development Experiences

Abstract

Many aid-receiving countries have fallen into the dire trap of aiddependent, despite the increasing scale of international aid transfers. The billions of dollars in aid from wealthy countries to developing African nations have effortlessly become ‘dead aid’ as they failed to reduce the escalation of poverty levels and increase growth rates (Moyo 2009). Post-conflict countries, such as Cambodia, unable to refuse aid, are now rife with the pernicious effects of aid dependence and its perversion of Cambodian democracy (Ear 2013). William Easterly (2003), in this regard, argued that the white man’s burden would be reduced only if the West’s donors changed the fundamental identity of development aid from planners to searchers. Indeed, it is a longstanding impasse in the aid industry: the more aid dependent a country, the more distorted its incentive to develop sustainably.