Population ageing is reshaping the demographic make-up of countries across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Individuals are, on average, living longer, healthier lives. This is both a major success story for the OECD, and a potential challenge for society, as individuals develop different needs into old age.
Regional arrangements have dramatically increased over the past three decades. Despite its numerous shortcomings, the European Union was a model for most of these. In particular, the objective of fostering income convergence across member countries is an important element of the regional integration process, for example via regional policies and various funding instruments. The paper argues that this central dimension of regionalism is de facto inherently difficult in developing countries, despite the de jure existence in the treaties of objectives of income convergence and funding institutions, and that this represents an important curb on regional integration. A series of reasons are demonstrated via examples from Sub-Saharan Africa: i) arrangements are firstly trade agreements; ii) member countries are low-income economies that are structurally affected by fiscal crises, since revenues depend on the volatile prices of commodities, in contrast with industrialised countries; iii) aid dependence externalises decisions and aggravates revenues volatility; iv) markets and export structures are characterised by economic asymmetries and lack of complementarities, particularly in poor landlocked countries, which makes it so that competition policies may be inefficient and trade integration trade diverting; v) rather than South-South arrangements, North-South ones are viewed as more efficient for developing countries: growth here, however, comes from policies decided outside the country and not from policies elaborated within the group of developing countries, with the associated uncertainty and possible policy reversals; vi) funding instruments are vulnerable to political economies that are often characterised by secrecy, lack of transparency, weak governance and informal cross-border flows, all of which lead to leakages of funds and limited implementation of decisions at the lower levels. These constraints in turn weaken the efficiency of other objectives of regionalism, such as trade enhancing.
Most of the existing literature on Japan’s assistance policy is written from realist perspectives that emphasise interest-based and structural variables. While these approaches have provided useful insights, they remain insufficient for understanding some of the changes that have occurred in this policy sector since the 1990s. Such changes include the introduction of the human security norm, and increasing the humanitarian and post-conflict reconstruction assistance delivered by Japan. Japan’s contribution to the international efforts to eradicate terrorism in Afghanistan through post-conflict reconstruction assistance is a significant case that has received little scholarly attention in English-language literature. This paper is an attempt to fill that gap. By focusing on the policy-making process, the paper seeks to shed light on the questions of why and how Japan has become involved in the post-conflict reconstruction in Afghanistan in the aftermath of the United States–led coalition’s military intervention in 2001. The paper analyses the initial policy-making process under the Koizumi Administration by giving special attention to the period between 2001 and 2003. Through a Constructivist lens that emphasises the role of identity and domestic political context, it is argued that the middle-power identity adopted by the political elite, and the human security norm in line with that identity, have affected the direction and content of Japan’s response to terrorism.
