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Tracking Under-Reported Financial Flows: China’s Development Finance and the Aid-Conflict Nexus Revisited
Austin M. Strange, Axel Dreher, Andreas Fuchs, Bradley Parks and Michael J. Tierney

Published in: Journal of Conflict Resolution 61(5): 935-963, May 2017



Abstract
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 (OF) to Africa from 2000 to 2011. We find that China’s commitments amounted to approximately US$73 billion, of which US$15 billion are comparable to Official Development Assistance following Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development definitions. We provide details on 1,511 projects to fifty African countries. We use this database to extend previous research on aid and conflict, which suffers from omitted-variable bias due to the exclusion of Chinese development finance. Our results show that sudden withdrawals of “traditional” aid no longer induce conflict in the presence of sufficient alternative funding from China. Our findings highlight the importance of gathering more complete data on the development activities of “nontraditional donors” to better understand the link between aid and conflict.

Published article
Supplementary information
Database
Working paper (May 2015)
Working paper (January 2014)
Previous version of the paper (April 2013)
Presentations at conferences and workshops
  • International Relations Workshop, Department of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA (02/2015)
  • School of International Economics and Trade Weekly Forum, Central University of Finance and Economics, Beijing, China (09/2014)
  • First Symposium of Development and Institutional Economics, Kaifeng, China (06/2014)
  • Guest Lecture at the Institute for West Asian & African Studies (IWAAS), Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), Beijing, China (06/2013)
  • Guest Lecture at the National Health Development Research Center (NHDRC), Ministry of Health, Beijing, China (06/2013)
  • Guest Lecture at the School of International and Public Affairs, Jiaotong University, Shanghai, China (06/2013)
  • Center for Global Development PublicEvent, Center for Global Development, Washington, DC, USA (04/2013) (event website) (event video)

In the media (newspapers, blogs)
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