ABSTRACT
The administrative mechanisms managing official development assistance (ODA) in Australia and Japan are significantly different in structure and operation. Technical cooperation helps to underpin the largest single component of Japanese ODA, the bilateral loans program, and therefore has a policy relevance well beyond its immediate purpose. This chapter compares and contrasts the two countries’ ODA efforts in recent years, paying particular attention to the way in which each country deals with “technical cooperation.” Japan’s ODA program has always been larger than that of Australia, even in the early days of the 1960s. The perennial complications of implementing Japan’s ODA – due to its size, its participants, its reach, influence, and effects – are generally absent from Australia, yet both countries have spent, over the decades, considerable time in reevaluating the processes and effects of their respective programs. The obsession in Japan with the distinction between types of financial flow is a minor issue in the Australian situation.
