The economic relationship between Korea and ASEAN countries has deepened over the past few decades. The geo-political importance of ASEAN has magnified as ASEAN members enter into free trade agreements with Korea, China and Japan. Also, as the regional underdeveloped countries like Vietnam and Cambodia started to grow fast in the current decade, the ASEAN is believed to strengthen its status in the world economy and politics in the future. Undoubtedly, the changing status of ASEAN urges Korea to extend its economic and political relationship with the countries in this area.
The purpose of this study is to evaluate the socio-economic development of Vietnam, Cambodia and Myanmar. Sustainable development of these countries are in conformity with Korea’s interests as Korea regard these countries as strategic partners and plan to provide substantial portion of her ODA resources to these countries. It’s hard to consider Korea’s ODA policy has been systematic and efficient so far. As a member of Development Assistance Committee of OECD, Korea plans to increase her ODA resources significantly, which makes it indispensible to conduct a serious research on the recipient countries as well as to reframe its overall ODA policy. In this regard, this study not only provides a systematic method to evaluate socio-economic development of these countries but also evaluate the status of these countries. The main feature of the method is to establish consolidated indices for socio-economic development taking advantage of a variety of existing data. Secondly, a field study is conducted to complement the above method in order to reflect qualitative features of socio-economic development. Extensive interviews were conducted with local experts, government officials, scholars and international agencies with respect to Vietnam. Finally, the identification of most problematic areas enabled us to provide possible areas for cooperation between Korea and these partner countries. It is hoped that this study provides a good foundation in the process of ODA policy formulation to these countries.
It is not surprising that the ASEAN underdeveloped countries face similar challenges in the course of their socio-economic development. Actually, in almost every area of development capacity, the ASEAN underdeveloped countries are lagging behind those countries which they are targeting to catch up with. Obviously, it is not realistic for Korea to provide her ODA resource to help improve all the areas of problems considering Koreas limited ODA capacity and experience. Therefore, this study identified several areas of cooperation on which Korea should focus in formulating its ODA strategy.
For economic development, these areas include enhancement of infrastructure, institutional development for market economy, technological cooperation. Considering that industrialization is one of the most important development goals of these countries, strengthening these selected areas directly support the strategy by enhancing production capacities of these economies. Furthermore, this study take into consideration of the fact that Korea has comparative advantages in the above areas. For social development, health and education are selected for areas of cooperation. Peoples of these countries are exposed to various diseases like HIV, tuberculosis and malaria. Also, these countries do not provide adequate education service which is an essential element of sustained economic and social development. For these areas, this study provides general directions of ODA policy for Vietnam, Cambodia and Myanmar, respectively.