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This paper describes the aid allocation behaviours of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) donors and their response to the emergence of China in the aid landscape. Our analysis presents evidences of donors' competition in Africa. We investigate whether African countries with the Chinese influence expanding receive favourable aid modalities from G7 donors over the period 2000–2011. We find a robust positive relationship between the level of aid and the number of China projects a country receives and the level of bilateral aid from G7 donors, even after accounting for standard economic and political factors. Results indicate that DAC donors use bilateral aid to tackle the increasing influence of China in Africa, by delivering more aid to countries with natural resources or strategic political interest. The paper also assesses empirically whether strategic interests and economic competition between DAC donors and China have influenced the composition of aid flows received by African countries. Our empirical strategy is sharpened by the use of a spatial‐X model and a difference‐in‐difference estimation that leverages a ‘natural’ experiment in DAC aid flows in the aftermath of the financial crisis, with China increasing his sphere of influence in Africa. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Inflation targeting (IT) has gained much traction over the past two decades, becoming a framework of reference for the conduct of monetary policy. However, the debate about its very merits and macroeconomic consequences remains inconclusive. This paper digs deeper into the issue through a meta-regression analysis (MRA) of the existing literature, making it the first application of a MRA to the macroeconomic effects of IT adoption. Building on 8,059 estimated coefficients from a very broad sample of 113 studies, the paper finds that the empirical literature suffers from two types of publication bias. First, authors, editors and reviewers prefer results featuring beneficial effects of IT adoption on inflation volatility, real GDP growth and fiscal performances; second, they promote results with estimated coefficients that are significantly different from zero. However, after filtering out the publication biases, we still find meaningful (genuine) effects of IT in reducing inflation and real GDP growth volatility, but no significant genuine effects on inflation volatility and the level of real GDP growth. Interestingly, the results indicate that the impact of IT varies systematically across studies, depending on the sample structure and composition, the time coverage, the estimation techniques, country-specific factors, IT implementation parameters, and publication characteristics.