Chinese “aid” is a lightning rod for criticism. Policy-makers, journalists, and public intellectuals claim that Beijing uses its largesse to cement alliances with political leaders, secure access to ...natural resources, and create exclusive commercial opportunities for Chinese firms—all at the expense of citizens living in developing countries. We argue that much of the controversy about Chinese “aid” stems from a failure to distinguish between China’s Official Development Assistance (ODA) and more commercially oriented sources and types of state financing. Using a new database on China’s official financing commitments to Africa from 2000 to 2013, we find that the allocation of Chinese ODA is driven primarily by foreign policy considerations, while economic interests better explain the distribution of less concessional flows. These results highlight the need for better measures of an increasingly diverse set of non-Western financial activities.
This paper empirically examines the relative effectiveness of total foreign aid and foreign energy aid inflows on CO2 emissions in India over the period of 1978-2014 by endogenising economic growth, ...energy consumption, globalisation, FDI and remittances inflows as additional factors in a carbon emissions function. The results emanating from the ARDL bounds test provides evidence of a significant long-run relationship among the variables. Interestingly, it is observed that the foreign aid inflows, globalisation, and energy consumption significantly reduce CO2 emissions, whereas foreign energy aid inflows, economic growth, FDI and remittances inflows induce it. From a climate mitigation policy perspective, the results suggest that the Indian government can focus more on receiving the inflow of total foreign aid than foreign energy aid to improve the environmental quality. Given the potentiality of total foreign aid in driving the quality of the environment in India, it may be argued that much more utilisation of total foreign aid needs to be directed towards long-run investment on environmental sustainability enhancing-driven clean energy projects for an emerging economy like India.
•Assessing the effectiveness of foreign aid vs foreign energy aid on CO2 emissions.•India's CO2 emissions function is estimated using ARDL model for 1978–2014.•Foreign aid, energy use and globalisation improve India's environmental health.•Foreign energy aid inflows are not effective as it harms India's environmental quality.•Economic growth, FDI and remittances inflows also impede environmental quality.
•The world is not on track to achieve many human-development related Sustainable Development Goals.•Some targets are especially challenging: access to safe sanitation, upper secondary school ...completion, and underweight children.•Twenty-eight most vulnerable countries (MVCs) are projected to not achieve any of the selected human development SDG targets explored here.•Population in MVCs is projected to grow from 751 million in 2015 to 1721 million by 2050.•Globally, nearly 1 in 4 youths are projected to live in an MVC by 2030.
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) call upon all countries to achieve 17 broad development goals by 2030. The SDGs are a central component of many national development plans and foreign aid strategies. While the SDGs have become a central aspect of development planning, how achievable are they under present conditions? This paper explores a dynamic “middle-of-the-road” baseline global development scenario (Shared Socio-economic Pathway 2) using an integrated assessment model (International Futures) to evaluate progress toward target values on nine indicators related to six human development SDGs. We find that, between 2015 and 30, the world will make only limited progress towards achieving those SDGs with our current set of policy priorities. Our study finds that across the variables explored here (nine indicators for 186 countries = 1674 country-indicators), 43 percent had already reached target values by 2015. By 2030, target values are projected to be achieved for 53 percent of country-variables. This paper highlights special difficulty in achieving targets on some SDG indicators (access to safe sanitation, upper secondary school completion, and underweight children) representing persistent development issues that will not be solved without a significant shift in domestic and international aid policies and prioritization. In addition, we highlight 28 particularly vulnerable countries that are not projected to achieve any of the nine human development related target values in a middle-of-the-road scenario. These most vulnerable countries (MVCs) must be the focus of international assistance.
Since the establishment of traditional Chinese foreign aid, the People’s Republic of China has participated as both a donor and a recipient in foreign aid mechanisms. This has become a major issue in ...international relations. Until the Export-Import Bank of China and the China Development Bank were established in 1994, Chinese foreign aid could be considered traditional. As the focus of this study, traditional Chinese foreign aid has gained a disparate place in the literature due to its high level of involvement with aid mechanisms, domestic economic resources and motivations. In particular, the relationship between the PRC’s foreign aid motivations and its economic resources showed how effectively mainland China applied the foreign aid mechanism, which has been one of the main issues of these international relations. This study examines the relationship between the different economic conditions and foreign aid motivations of the Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping periods and attempts to reveal certain continuities and changes between the two periods.
REGIONAL FAVORITISM Hodler, Roland; Raschky, Paul A.
The Quarterly journal of economics,
05/2014, Letnik:
129, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
We complement the literature on distributive politics by taking a systematic look at regional favoritism in a large and diverse sample of countries and by employing a broad measure that captures the ...aggregate distributive effect of many different policies. In particular, we use satellite data on nighttime light intensity and information about the birthplaces of the countries’ political leaders. In our panel of 38,427 subnational regions from 126 countries with yearly observations from 1992 to 2009, we find that subnational regions have more intense nighttime light when being the birth region of the current political leader. We argue that this finding provides evidence for regional favoritism. We explore the dynamics and the geographical extent of regional favoritism and show that regional favoritism is most prevalent in countries with weak political institutions and poorly educated citizens. Furthermore, foreign aid inflows and oil rents tend to fuel regional favoritism in weakly institutionalized countries, but not elsewhere.
•NGO expansion in the Global South has rarely strengthened indigenous civil societies.•Weak roots, political restrictions and over-professionalization undermine NGO legitimacy.•These problems have ...not lessened in the last 20years, so NGO impact remains weak.•Nevertheless, NGOs retain an important potential role as bridge-builders.•In this role, NGOs can support the independent action of other civil society groups.
Serious questions remain about the ability of NGOs to meet long-term transformative goals in their work for development and social justice. We investigate how, given their weak roots in civil society and the rising tide of technocracy that has swept through the world of foreign aid, most NGOs remain poorly placed to influence the real drivers of social change. However we also argue that NGOs can take advantage of their traditional strengths to build bridges between grassroots organizations and local and national-level structures and processes, applying their knowledge of local contexts to strengthen their roles in empowerment and social transformation.
We investigate whether foreign aid from China is prone to political capture in aid-receiving countries. Specifically, we examine whether more Chinese aid is allocated to the birth regions of ...political leaders, controlling for indicators of need and various fixed effects. We collect data on 117 African leaders' birthplaces and geocode 1650 Chinese development projects across 2969 physical locations in Africa from 2000 to 2012. Our econometric results show that political leaders' birth regions receive substantially larger financial flows from China in the years when they hold power compared to what the same region receives at other times. We find evidence that these biases are a consequence of electoral competition: Chinese aid disproportionately benefits politically privileged regions in country-years when incumbents face upcoming elections and when electoral competitiveness is high. We observe no such pattern of favoritism in the spatial distribution of World Bank development projects.
•We study the subnational allocation of Chinese aid in Africa.•We combine information of leaders' birthplaces with geocoded Chinese aid data.•Political leaders' birth regions receive more Chinese aid.•Effects are stronger before executive elections and when elections are competitive.•We find no birth-region bias in the allocation of World Bank aid.
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