What Drives Japanese INGOs to Operate in Latin American Countries?

ABSTRACT

International nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) provide essential aid and public services to less-developed countries. Although most literature focuses on Western INGOs, Asian INGOs have also become globally active. Little is known about what motivates INGOs to provide services in other regions, such as Latin America. In this study, we seek to identify the criteria Japanese INGOs use to select Latin American recipient countries. We propose that Japanese INGO operational location decisions are a function of Japanese foreign policy agenda, Japan-recipient country business relations, and recipient country’s need and liberalization. Using data from Japanese INGOs working in Latin America and 24 Latin American countries on contextual, macroeconomic, and demographic indicators, we find that the significant factors driving INGO decisions to operate in Latin American countries are need and the presence of Japanese businesses in the recipient country. Results have practical implications for foreign aid targeting and economic development.

KEYWORDS:

• Development
• international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs)
• Japan
• Latin America
• location

Notes

¹ In the original JANIC database, INGOs are supposed to update their information; however, the updated information varies across INGOs. Hence, most Japanese INGOs working in Latin America updated their JANIC information in 2013, but not all of them did so. In addition, for some INGOs, the purpose of operation in a Latin America country is not clear in the original data set. For this reason, we decided to contact directly the INGOs, where possible, in order to corroborate and/or update their information.

² A total of 22 organizations participated in our inquiries, including e-mail inquiries. In addition to these 22 organizations, three other organizations responded that they have not worked in Latin America but rather with Brazilian immigrants in Japan. We also found that one organization did not work in Latin America between 2009 and 2013.

³ Japanese INGOs operated in Bahamas and St. Lucia. However, these countries are not included in our analysis due to the unavailability of country-level variables such as foreign aid, polity score, HDI, and CPI.

⁴ The total net ODA includes negative values since loan repayments are recorded as negative and deducted from ODA and loans. If loan repayments are higher than new ODA, net ODA shows a negative value (OECD, 2016). We did not use a logged form of Japanese Foreign Aid since the result of a link test shows that a model using a logged form of the variable is mis-specified.