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The literature on the relationship between foreign aid and institutions has found that the effects of aid vary across different donor characteristics and delivery mechanisms. This article focuses on China's resource-related development projects, which have been considered controversial due to the relative lack of conditionality. By distinguishing between vertical and horizontal dimensions of political accountability, the study finds that China's resource-related projects are particularly detrimental to the accountability of recipient countries' horizontal (legislative and judicial) institutions. These projects are often delivered to resource-rich countries, in the form of packaging access to resources and infrastructure construction, to improve China's own energy access. Local officials may be tempted to weaken horizontal institutions so that the projects can be implemented quickly. Nevertheless, these projects have little effect on vertical accountability, as China has less intention and capacity to fundamentally restrain electoral competition in recipient countries.

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Although the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has exhibited substantial progress over the past 40 years in improving primary schooling, marked variations in these achievements are evident within the region. This is an interesting puzzle if we recognize the MENA region is highly homogeneous in terms of religion, politics and socio-economic structure. We argue that in this paper, differences in state capacity–the degree to which MENA states attains desired primary education goals–contribute to these variations. To substantiate our argument, we applied different state capacity indicators and tested their impacts on primary schooling for the period 1971–2014. Empirical findings largely support our observations and results still hold with alternative indicators and model specifications. These findings have policy and academic implications for the study of state capacity, primary education and the MENA region.