Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP10704
Authors: Axel Dreher; Andreas Fuchs; Roland Hodler; Bradley C Parks; Paul A Raschky; Michael J Tierney
Abstract: This article investigates whether China's foreign aid is particularly prone to political capture by political leaders of aid-receiving countries. Specifically, we examine whether more Chinese aid is allocated to the political leaders' birth regions and regions populated by the ethnic group to which the leader belongs, controlling for indicators of need and various fixed effects. We have collected data on 117 African leaders' birthplaces and ethnic groups and geocoded 1,650 Chinese development finance projects across 3,097 physical locations committed to Africa over the 2000-2012 period. Our econometric results show that current political leaders' birth regions receive substantially larger financial flows from China than other regions. On the contrary, when we replicate the analysis for the World Bank, our regressions with region-fixed effects show no evidence of such favoritism. For Chinese and World Bank aid alike, we also find no evidence that African leaders direct more aid to areas populated by groups who share their ethnicity, when controlling for region-fixed effects.
Keywords: Africa; Aid Allocation; China; Favoritism; Foreign Aid; Georeferenced Data; Official Development Assistance; Spatial Analysis
JEL Codes: D73; F35; P33; R11
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Chinese aid flows to the birth regions of current political leaders (F35) | allocation of aid (F35) |
| birth regions of political leaders (P39) | allocation of aid (F35) |
| Chinese aid flows to the birth regions of political leaders (F35) | larger flows than to other regions (R11) |
| Chinese aid flows to birth regions of political leaders (F35) | overall official financing flows (F30) |
| aid is disproportionately directed to areas populated by the ethnic groups of leaders (F35) | no evidence found (Y70) |