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This research note empirically examines China’s development assistance to Asia, a region critical to China’s geostrategic ambition, from 2000 to 2014. It uses AidData’s Global Chinese Official Finance Dataset, one of the most reliable publicly available data sources on Chinese aid, which systematically collects and classifies different types of China’s official development finance. It is found that, despite a recent surge, China’s development assistance to Asia remains highly limited compared to that of Japan, Asia’s top donor, and that the economic sectors of energy, transport, and mining dominate financial flows. Econometric analysis results suggest that China’s aid allocation in Asia is influenced by its export relations, but, more importantly, that foreign policy considerations do not play a significant role, which is in contrast to the findings of recent work on Chinese aid to Africa. The results suggest that better measures may be needed to properly capture China’s strategic interests in Asia, including its involvement in the territorial dispute in the South China Sea.

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Although remittance income is likely to increase the level of financial resources in the household, such a contribution should be assessed against the disruptive effect of migration on other aspects of family life. Using individual-level data from the Philippines, this article explores the impact of international migration on the life satisfaction of the families of migrants in the home country. The analysis compares happiness outcomes across non-migrant households, the households reliant on remittances as a primary source of household income, and the households that receive remittances but do not rely on them. The findings suggest that migration is positively associated with higher levels of life satisfaction only when remittances are large enough to compensate for the psychological distress caused by the migration. The results confirm the importance of remittances as a source of human improvement but, at the same time, highlight the fact that international migration is not a costless enterprise.