What Matters for the Successful Policy Transfer? Empirical Evidence From South Korea’s Knowledge Sharing Program(KSP)

The Republic of Korea’s Knowledge Sharing Program(KSP) is a successful example of technical assistance aid providing policy advice, consultation, and training with increasing demand from many developing countries. However, the actual adoption of the “advised” policy or institution is not decided by the project output itself but is exposed to the influence of other environmental and contextual factors. With the KSP data from 2004 to 2013, this paper introduces empirical evidence into which factors are critical in policy advice-to-adoption process applying a bivariate censored probit model. The result demonstrates that the political environment, measured with the democracy index, has significant impact on policy adoption, with varying degrees of impact depending on democracy categorization. Budget and salience of the policy are also identified to have a significant impact, where direct management of the project leads to less follow-up but higher probability of successful adoption.