China's development model challenges the approaches of traditional Western donors like the World Bank. We argue that both aim at stability, but differ in the norms propagated to achieve that. Using fixed effects and IV estimations, we analyze a broad range of subnational stability measures in...

Using geo-referenced data on development projects by the World Bank and China, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the effect of aid on conflict using fixed effects and instrumental variables strategies. The results show that aid projects seem to reduce rather than fuel conflict, on average....

In the new millennium, the Western aid effort towards Africa has surged due to writings by well-known economists, a celebrity mass advocacy campaign, and decisions by Western leaders to make Africa a major foreign policy priority. This survey contrasts the predominant "transformational" approach...

The political economy literature highlights the redistribution of resources to political support groups - often along regional or ethnic lines - as a dominant feature of political systems. Against this assumption, Kasara (2007) documents a puzzling result of discriminatory rent extraction by...

China’s aid to Africa receives significant attention from policymakers, development practitioners, and observers worldwide. This is even more the case since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, given China’s importance as a donor of vaccines, ventilators, face masks, disinfectants, and...

During the past decade, the EU has introduced several reforms to make collective development policy more coherent and effective. At the same time, development exists alongside (and sometimes competes with) other policy fields, particularly in settings where the EU has strong economic interests....

Those involved in the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) campaign routinely state Africa will miss all the MDGs. This paper argues that a series of arbitrary choices made in defining success or failure as achieving numerical targets for the Millennium Development Goals made attainment of the MDGs...