Rogue Aid? The Determinants of China's Aid Allocation

By Axel Dreher, Andreas Fuchs. Social Science Research Network, 2011

113 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Foreign aid from China is often characterized as ‘rogue aid’ that is not guided by recipient need but by China’s national interests alone. However, no econometric study so far confronts this claim with data. We make use of various datasets, covering the 1956-2006 period, to empirically test to which extent political and commercial interests shape China’s aid allocation decisions. We estimate the determinants of China’s allocation of project aid, food aid, medical teams and total aid money to developing countries, comparing its allocation decisions with traditional and other so-called emerging donors. We find that political considerations are an important determinant of China’s allocation of aid. However, in comparison to other donors, China does not pay substantially more attention to politics. In contrast to widespread perceptions, we find no evidence that China’s aid allocation is dominated by natural resource endowments. Moreover, China’s allocation of aid seems to be widely independent of democracy and governance in recipient countries. Overall, denominating aid from China as ‘rogue aid’ seems unjustified.

Subfields: Development, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dc64aa12bcde8fe598e09c281d36911f0f3f310e

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Development

1. Andreas Kotsadam
2. A. Isaksson

In Safety Research

1. Andreas Kotsadam
2. A. Isaksson

In Sociology and Political Science

1. A. Isaksson
2. Andreas Kotsadam
3. M. Bünning

Citations in the corpus

• Racing to the bottom? Chinese development projects and trade union involvement in Africa (2018, background): “As such, the paper contributes to the above strands of literature as well as to an emerging quantitative literature on the effects and determinants of China’s aid allocation (Dreher and Fuchs, 2015; Dreher et al., 2015; Dreher et al., 2016; Isaksson and Kotsadam, 2016).”