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This research explores the intricate dynamics of national interests realised through Japan's official development assistance (ODA) to China. It aims to deepen the understanding of these mechanisms, detailing the extent to which Japan has accomplished its national interests.

The paper applies the role theory and narrative analysis to elucidate Japan's national role conception and its categories of national interests with regards to its ODA policy. It utilises both qualitative and quantitative methods to examine the success rate in achieving Japan's diplomatic objectives and how those interests have manifested over time.

The findings suggest a mixed outcome. Whilst Japan's ODA to China has helped in expanding trade and fostering mutual understanding and cooperation, it has been less successful in promoting democratic governance in China or effectively counterbalancing China's regional power. Hence, the realisation of national interests through ODA is a complex process contingent upon numerous factors.

This study stands out for its multifaceted approach in examining Japan's ODA policy towards China, integrating both quantitative and qualitative methodologies and applying the role theory in the context of international development aid. It fills a significant gap in the literature by analysing the interplay between national interests and foreign aid, providing nuanced insights into the successes and challenges of Japan's pursuit of its diplomatic objectives. The study's findings have important implications for understanding the complexity of international aid dynamics and can inform future policy decisions in the realm of international relations and foreign aid.

This paper analyzes the direct effect of financial development and the mediating impact of financial development through foreign direct investment (FDI), foreign aid and trade on economic growth for all Asian countries.

A fixed-effect model with Driscoll–Kraay panel corrected estimators was employed to find the direct and mediating impact of financial developments on growth for all 47 Asian economies from 1980 to 2020. The bootstrapped panel-quantile regression (BPQR) model is used to check how this effect varies for different income groups of countries.

The results demonstrated that financial development positively impacts countries' economic growth. The interaction effect of financial development with FDI, foreign aid and foreign trade negatively impacts economic growth. The BPQR results showed that FDI and foreign aid help in the growth of lower quantile economies; however, the impact is negative for middle- and upper-income countries. Trade impacts growth positively for all the quantiles of economies.

The results suggest that the Asian economies must continue to provide thrust on the financial development of their own countries to achieve better growth. It also implied that the dependence on external finance is good for low-income countries and not advisable for middle- and upper-income countries.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the current study is the first to provide empirical evidence on analyzing both the direct and interaction effect of financial development on economic growth by considering all the Asian economies.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-09-2022-0587

What kinds of support do interstate rivals provide to domestic actors in ongoing civil wars? And how do domestic actors utilize the support they receive? This chapter answers these questions by comparing Iranian and Saudi military and non-military (mediation, foreign aid and religious soft-power promotion) support to the Houthis and to the Government of Yemen (GoY) during the Saada wars (2004–2010) and the internationalized civil war (2015–2018). It also focuses on the processes through which the GoY and the Houthis have utilized this support for their own strategic purposes. This chapter applies a structured, focused comparison methodology and relies on data from a review of both primary and secondary sources complemented by 14 interviews. This chapter finds that there were less external interventions in the conflict in Saada than in the internationalized civil war. During the latter, a broader set of intervention strategies enabled further instrumentalization by domestic actors, which in turn contributed to the protracted nature of the conflict. This chapter contributes to the literature on interstate rivalry and third-party intervention. The framework of analysis is applicable to civil wars that experience intervention by rivals, such as Syria or Libya.

China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is the most ambitious investment strategy for infrastructural development belonging to the significant potential for stimulating regional economic growth in Asia, Europe and Africa. This study aims to investigate the impact of infrastructure on spurring inward foreign direct investment (FDI) within the purview of human capital, GDP per capita, foreign aid, trade, domestic investment, population and institutional quality in BRI countries.

In doing so, the authors analyze panel data from 2000 to 2019 within the framework of the system generalized method of movement (GMM) approach for 66 BRI countries from Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

The investigated results demonstrate that aggregate and disaggregate infrastructure indices, e.g. transport, telecommunications, financial and energy infrastructures, are the driving forces in attracting foreign direct investment (FDI) in the BRI countries. In addition, control variables (i.e. institutional quality, human capital, trade, domestic investment, foreign aid and GDP per capita) play an essential role in spurring FDI inflows.

The authors’ study uniquely investigates both the pre- (2000–2012) and post- (2013–2019) BRI scenarios using the aggregate and disaggregate infrastructural components from the perspectives of full and clustered sample regions, such as Asia, Europe, Africa and the Middle East. The study provides several policy implications.

This study assesses the relevance of foreign aid to the incidence of capital flight and unemployment in 20 countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

The study is for the period 1996–2018, and the empirical evidence is based on interactive quantile regressions in order to assess the nexuses throughout the conditional distribution of the unemployment outcome variable.

From the findings, capital flight has a positive unconditional incidence on unemployment, while foreign aid dampens the underlying positive unconditional nexus. Moreover, in order for the positive incidence of capital flight to be completely dampened, foreign aid thresholds of 2.230 and 3.964 (% of GDP) are needed at the 10th and 25th quantiles, respectively, of the conditional distribution of unemployment. It follows that the relevance of foreign aid in crowding out the unfavourable incidence of capital flight on unemployment is significantly apparent only in the lowest quantiles or countries with below-median levels of unemployment. The policy implications are discussed.

The study complements the extant literature by assessing the importance of development assistance in how capital flight affects unemployment in sub-Saharan Africa.