Chinese “aid” is a lightning rod for criticism. Policymakers, journalists, and public intellectuals claim that Beijing is using its largesse to cement alliances with political leaders, secure access to natural resources, and create exclusive commercial opportunities for Chinese firms—all...

China’s development finance is sizable but reliable information is scarce. To address critical information gaps, we introduce a new open source methodology for collecting project-level development finance information and create a database of Chinese official finance to Africa from 2000-2011....

This article reviews the literature on the linkages between political tensions, economic diplomacy and international trade in the light of China’s rise in the global economy. The existing scholarly work suggests that economic diplomacy should be more pivotal in economic exchange with China...

Little is known about the firm-level dynamics behind trade responses to political tensions. This article reinvestigates variation in the travel pattern of the 14th Dalai Lama to study how political tensions affect trading decisions of Chinese importers. Using monthly trade data from China...

One goal of China's Go Out policy is to create goodwill in countries around the world. At the same time, China's growing economic engagement has provoked much criticism. This paper is the first to study whether these activities change the attitudes of individuals in developing countries towards...

It is puzzling that India, which has a large domestic constituency of people suffering from underdevelopment, chronic poverty and mal-governance, is emerging as an important aid donor. With the intension of understanding why poor countries provide foreign aid, this article is the first to...

Credit rating agencies are frequently criticized for producing sovereign ratings that do not accurately reflect the economic and political fundamentals of rated countries. This article discusses how the home country of rating agencies could affect rating decisions as a result of political...

Do states use trade to reward and punish partners? WTO rules and the pressures of globalization restrict states’ capacity to manipulate trade policies, but we argue that governments can link political goals with economic outcomes using less direct avenues of influence over firm behavior....

Over 300 government members have had the main responsibility for international development cooperation in 23 member countries of the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee since the organization started reporting detailed Official Development Assistance (ODA) data in 1967. Understanding their...

In this paper, we revisit the association between happiness and inequality. We argue that the perceived fairness of the income generation process affects this association. Building on a two-period model of individual life-time utility maximization, we predict that persons with higher perceived...