The Political Economy of China's Aid Policy in Africa

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in ABSTRACTIn recent years, China has become a major power on the African continent, not only with respect to trade and investment, but also as a donor of development aid. Although there is no accurate measure of the exact size of China's aid program, since China rather underestimates the volume in official statistics, estimates on the basis of press releases, official announcements and assessments of major projects in Africa suggest that China has already overtaken the World Bank in lending to Africa.In this article, we analyze China's aid policy in Africa from a political economy perspective. We show that China is using (tied) aid and loans in order to reach specific economic and political goals and that Beijing has been quite successful in doing so. The impressing success of China in getting access to African countries can be explained by comparative advantages of the People's Republic, especially in unstable nations and "rough" states. China's engagement in Africa causes some serious problems with traditional donors. We discuss these conflicts and provide a critical assessment of China's role in Africa. Finally, we discuss the policy implications for the donor community.

Tracking Underreported Financial Flows: China’s Development Finance and the Aid–Conflict Nexus Revisited

“…8 While the Ministry of Commerce, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Finance are the primary actors, Chinese development finance is administered through a multi-tiered system that includes participation from 23 government ministries and commissions as well as local, provincial and regional ministries of commerce (Huang 2007). For example, the Ministry of Social Welfare oversees the implementation of humanitarian aid programs (Christensen 2010) and military aid is handled by the Ministry of National Defense (Pehnelt 2007 There is a compelling need for a common vocabulary and categorization scheme for Chinese development finance. Bräutigam (2009Bräutigam ( , 2011 demonstrates that many forms of Chinese development finance do not fit cleanly into OECD-DAC categorizations.…”

Are “New” Donors Challenging World Bank Conditionality?

“…Several cases are reported in Kurlantzick (2006) and Naim (2007) in which different countries turned down loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank in favor of resources from the Chinese government because the prior demanded government reform to guarantee disbursements while the latter did not. Pehnelt (2007) even points out that the engagement of China enables African governments to reject demands by the IMF and the World to enhance transparency, implementing anti-corruption strategies and furthering their democratization efforts.…”

The Potential Role of Non-Traditional Donors’ Aid in Africa

“…(Xinhua, 2008)) and the list of pledges is reproduced in almost all documents relating to Chinese aid (or other activities) to Africa (see e.g. (Bräutigam, 2008b;le Pere & Shelton, 2007;Naidu & Herman, 2009;Pehnelt, 2007;Taylor, 2009) (Xinhua, 2008).…”

“…See Pehnelt (2007) for a similar argument regarding China's use of loans rather than grants, viz. loans provide positive reactions twice: when the loans are provided and again when the debts are forgiven.…”