China's renewed prominence is the most important development in international relations in the 21st century. Despite longstanding rhetoric of its own “peaceful rise”, China is increasingly viewed as a long-term strategic competitor, especially in the United States. Foreign aid is one arena...

China’s provision of development finance to other countries is sizable but reliable information is scarce. 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. We...

This paper investigates the impact of the US and China‘s foreign aid to Africa on trade flows between donor and recipient countries. Evidence from the gravity model estimates reveals that the two donors‘ exports are strengthened by their aids to African partners. Interestingly, China‘s aid...

Drawing on our recent work on local effects of Chinese development projects in Africa, this review article highlights a number of distinguishing features of Chinese aid, and discusses how these may translate into local aid impacts that differ from those of other donors. Unlike aid from other...

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, China's mask and vaccine diplomacy have been widely discussed, but the debate relies on a few stylized data points. This article introduces a systematic way to measure China's foreign aid in almost real-time through official customs records of...

We investigate whether and to what extent Chinese development finance affects infant mortality, combining 92 demographic and health surveys (DHS) for a maximum of 53 countries and almost 55,000 sub-national locations over the 2002-2014 period. We address causality by instrumenting aid with a set...