Japan’s infrastructure export and development cooperation: the role of ODA loan projects in the 2010s

ABSTRACT

Japan formulated its first infrastructure export strategy in 2010. However, the outputs and effects of that strategy and its successive revisions over the preceding decade have not yet been extensively reviewed. Although infrastructure came to the fore of the international agenda over the past decade, existing research has mostly discussed individual infrastructure projects and accompanying signalling, sloganeering, and strategic communications in the geopolitical and geo-economic context. This paper therefore aims to make an empirical and interpretive contribution to existing scholarship by comprehensively reviewing Japan’s infrastructure exports in 2010–19 and elucidating further its oft-disregarded commercial and developmental aspects. To do so, this article focuses on Official Development Assistance (ODA) loan projects, which count among the largest items of Japan’s infrastructure exports. We introduce and analyse a previously unexamined dataset on infrastructure-related ODA loan projects and contract awards, while also showcasing the avoidance of zero-sum-game approaches in Japan’s related strategy. We then discuss whether and how the changes of Japanese infrastructure export strategy affected the performance of Japan’s infrastructure export through the ODA loan projects as well as Japan’s relationship with the recipient countries, especially in the various parts of the Indo-Pacific region, such as Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Africa.

KEYWORDS:

• Japan
• official development assistance (ODA)
• infrastructure export strategy
• Indo-Pacific

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback and constructive suggestions on our research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 https://www.jica.go.jp/english/our_work/types_of_assistance/oda_loans/overseas/index.html

2 Japanese Fiscal Year (JFY) runs from 1 April to 31 March.

3 https://www2.jica.go.jp/en/yen_loan/index.php. The same data is utilized for Figure 1(b,c) and Tables 1 and 2.

4 Data utilized here covers all the data on the contracts with amount above 1 billion JPY (all the data disclosed in the annual reports), except one contract under the Matarbari Ultra Super Critical Coal-⁣Fired Power Plant project; this particular contract is excluded from the dataset, because the contract amount is too huge (638,582 million JPY) compared with the other contracts. The same dataset is utilized for Tables 3 and 4.

5 As for contracts awarded to multilateral joint ventures, we count these as contracts belonging to the main contractors. The same principle is applied to Tables 3 and 4.

6 https://www.jica.go.jp/english/publications/reports/annual/index.html. The same data is utilized for Tables 3 and 4.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kei Endo

Kei Endo is a Research Fellow at JICA Ogata Sadako Research Institute for Peace and Development, Japan. He is also a PhD candidate at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands. His research interest includes infrastructure developments in the developing countries, Public-Private Partnerships, and sustainable development. His research has been published in journals such as Public Works Management & Policy.

Nikolay Murashkin

Nikolay Murashkin is a Research Fellow at JICA Ogata Sadako Research Institute for Peace and Development and a scholar of contemporary Japanese foreign policy and international relations in the Asia-Pacific. His current research interests include Japan’s development cooperation and economic statecraft, the politics of connectivity infrastructure and finance in the Indo-Pacific and Eurasia, and international politics in Northeast Asia. Nikolay is the author of ‘Japan and the New Silk Road: Diplomacy, Development and Connectivity’ and has published book chapters and research articles in a number of peer-reviewed journals, such as Australian Journal of International Affairs, Asian Journal of Social Sciences, New Zealand Journal of East Asian Studies and others.