15th Largest among DAC Member States
South Korea provided US$2.52 billion of official development assistance (ODA) in 2019, the 15th largest* among the member states of the OECD's Development Assistance Committee (DAC), the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on April 17.
Korea's ODA in 2019 increased by $160 million from the year 2018, due to an increase in bilateral assistance, the minstry said.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) announced its preliminary statistics on ODA in the year 2019 from the 29 member states of the OECD’s DAC. Final statistics on ODA in 2019 will be released in December this year.
According to the OECD, the combined amount of ODA from the DAC member states stood at $152.8 billion, and the ODA/GNI ratio, the indicator of the level of aid relative to the size of the economy, was 0.30 percent on average.
South Korea's ODA/GNI ratio was 0.15 percent, a 0.01 percentage point increase from the previous year (0.14 percent).
The average annual increase rate of the Korea’s ODA from 2010 to 2019 is 11.9 percent, the highest among the member states. The ROK’s ODA more than doubled from 2010 (US$1.17 billion) to 2019 (US$2.52 billion).
Korea was followed by Hungary with 10.5 percent and Germany with 7.0 percent.
Since Korea’s accession to the OECD DAC in 2010, some DAC member states, including Spain and Greece, have been steadily reducing ODA due to difficult conditions at home and abroad, and as a result, ODA from all DAC member states has increased at an average annual rate of 2.4 percent.
The largest ODA provider among the DAC members is the United States, followed by Germany.