China has been exporting aid goods worth around USD 835 million annually since 2017. These material resources are distributed by China primarily according to geopolitical interests and increasingly to Asia and Africa. The outbreak of the COVID-19...

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, China's mask and vaccine diplomacy have been widely discussed, but the debate relies on a few stylized data points. This article introduces a systematic way to measure China's foreign aid in almost...

Bilateral donors use foreign aid to pursue soft power. We test the effectiveness of aid in reaching this goal by leveraging a new dataset on the precise commitment, implementation, and completion dates of Chinese development projects. We use data...

China and India increasingly provide aid and credit to developing countries. This paper explores whether India uses these financial instruments to compete for geopolitical and commercial influence with China (and vice versa). To do so, we build a new...

Using repeated cross-sectional survey data, we analyze whether China's growing economic engagement in Latin America has an effect on citizens’ perceptions of China within 18 Latin American countries over the 2002–2013 period. Our...

This paper introduces a new dataset of official financing — including foreign aid and other forms of concessional and non-concessional state financing

The research project studies the effects that China’s growing economic engagement has on African economies, and how China’s economic presence is perceived by African citizens. To this effect, the key dimensions of trade, investment, aid, debt, and...

Chinese aid comes with few strings attached, allowing recipient country leaders to use it for domestic political purposes. The vulnerability of Chinese aid to political capture has prompted speculation that it may be economically ineffective, or even...

Kiel Policy Brief No. 146: China assumed an important role during the worldwide outbreak of COVID-19 as the main exporter of critical medical goods such as face masks and disinfectants.

The COVID-19 outbreak has cut China's supply of and raised the world's demand for face masks, disinfectants, ventilators, and other critical medical goods. This article studies the economic and political factors that are associated with China's...