Chinese aid comes with few strings attached, allowing recipient country leaders to use it for domestic political purposes. The vulnerability of Chinese aid to political capture has prompted speculation that it may be economically ineffective, or even harmful. We test these claims by estimating...

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...

We assess the dynamics behind the high net resource transfers of donors and creditors - IDA, bilaterals, IBRD, IMF and other multilateral creditors - to the countries of sub-Saharan Africa in the 1980s and 1990s. Analyzing a panel of 37 recipient countries over the years 1978-98, we find that...

A new methodology, Tracking Under-Reported Financial Flows (TUFF), allows us to systematically gather open-source information - e.g. news reports, case studies, project inventories from embassy websites, and grant and loan data published by recipient governments - about Chinese development...

This study investigates the relationship between foreign aid and conflict incidence at the sub-national level across Africa using an innovative, high-resolution panel dataset of monthly grid-cell observations. By combining geo-referenced World Bank aid data with conflict event data from the...

Since the creation of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) in 2000, Chinese official development assistance (ODA) to Africa has increased drastically. Only few analyses on the determinants of Chinese ODA allocation to African countries are available. Moreover, existing literature mainly...

While there is extensive literature examining the growth and development effects of foreign aid, very little attention has been paid to its potential impact on social mobility. Thus, this paper provides the first empirical evidence on the effects of foreign aid on intergenerational educational...

This paper empirically investigates the effects of governance quality on the number of African asylum seekers in Europe over the period 1996–2018 and evaluates the extent to which official development aid acts as a catalyst. With this purpose in mind, different gravity model specifications and...

The central argument of this study is that given the magnitude of the investment in infrastructure that is required, especially in Africa, the role of foreign aid in the future should be distinctly different. While aid will be required to continue to fill the 'savings gap' in some small...

How does aid impact democracy in sub-Saharan Africa? Drawing on existing literature, this study elaborates on the various channels, direct and indirect, through which development and democracy aid has influenced transitions to multi-party regimes and democratic consolidation within the region....