Abstract. The air occluded in ice sheets and glaciers has, in general, a younger age (defined as the time after its isolation from the atmosphere) than the surrounding ice matrix because snow is first transformed into open porous firn, in which the air can exchange with the atmosphere. Only at a certain depth (tim-ice transition) the pores are pinched off and the air is definitely isolated from the atmosphere. The tim-ice transition depth is at around 70 rn under present climatic conditions at Summit, central Greenland. The air at this depth is roughly 10 years old due to diffusive mixing, whereas the ice is about 220 years old. This results in an age difference between the air and the ice of 210 years. This difference depends on temperature and accumulation rate and did thus not remain constant during the past. We used a dynamic tim densification model to calculate the tim-ice transition depth and the age of the ice at this depth and an air diffusion model to determine the age of the air at the transition. Past temperatures and accumulation rates have been deduced from the •5180 record using time independent functions. We present the results of model calculations of two paleotemperature scenarios yielding a record of the age difference between the air and the ice for the Greenland Ice Core Project (GRIP) and the Greenland Ice Sheet Project Two (GISP2) ice cores for the last 100,000 years. During the Holocene, the age difference stayed rather stable

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Foreign aid from China is often characterized as “rogue aid” that is guided by selfish interests alone. We collect data on Chinese project aid, food aid, medical staff and total aid money to developing countries, covering the 1956–2006 period, to empirically test to what extent self‐interests shape China's aid allocation. While political considerations shape China's allocation of aid, China does not pay substantially more attention to politics compared to Western donors. What is more, China's aid allocation seems to be widely independent of recipients' endowment with natural resources and institutional characteristics. Overall, denoting Chinese aid as “rogue aid” seems unjustified.

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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. Abstract. Chinese "aid" is a lightning rod for criticism. Policymakers, journalists, and public intellectuals claim that Beijing is using its largesse to cement alliances with political leaders, secure access to natural resources, and create exclusive commercial opportunities for Chinese firms-all at the expense of citizens living in developing countries. We argue that much of the controversy about Chinese "aid" stems from a failure to distinguish between China's Official Development Assistance (ODA) and more commercially-oriented sources and types of state financing. Using a new database on China's official financing commitments to Africa from 2000-2013, we find the allocation of Chinese ODA to be driven primarily by foreign policy considerations, while economic interests better explain the distribution of less concessional flows. Terms of use: Documents inThese results highlight the need for better measures of an increasingly diverse set of non-Western financial activities.

This article investigates whether the political leaders of aid-receiving countries use foreign aid inflows to further their own political or personal interests. Aid allocation biased by leaders' selfish interests arguably reduces the effectiveness of aid, negatively affecting development outcomes. We examine whether more Chinese aid is allocated to the political leaders' birth regions and regions populated by the ethnic group to which the leader belongs, controlling for objective indicators of need. We have collected data on 117 African leaders' birthplaces and ethnic groups and geocoded 1,955 Chinese development finance projects across 3,545 physical locations in Africa over the 2000-2012 period. The results from various fixed-effects regressions show that current political leaders' birth regions receive substantially larger financial flows from China than other regions. When we replicate the analysis for the World Bank, our regressions with region fixed effects show no evidence of favoritism. Once we control for region fixed effects, we do not find evidence that African leaders direct aid to areas populated by groups who share their ethnicity, for Chinese and World Bank aid alike.

China's development finance is sizable but reliable information is scarce. To address critical African countries. We use this database to extend previous research on the aid-conflict nexus. Our results show that sudden withdrawals of "traditional" aid are only more likely to induce conflict in the absence of sufficient alternative funding from China. More broadly, these findings highlight the importance of gathering better data on the development activities of China and other non-traditional donors to better understand the link between foreign aid and conflict.

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. Abstract. Chinese "aid" is a lightning rod for criticism. Policymakers, journalists, and public intellectuals claim that Beijing is using its largesse to cement alliances with political leaders, secure access to natural resources, and create exclusive commercial opportunities for Chinese firms-all at the expense of citizens living in developing countries. We argue that much of the controversy about Chinese "aid" stems from a failure to distinguish between China's Official Development Assistance (ODA) and more commercially-oriented sources and types of state financing. Using a new database on China's official financing commitments to Africa from 2000-2013, we find the allocation of Chinese ODA to be driven primarily by foreign policy considerations, while economic interests better explain the distribution of less concessional flows. Terms of use: Documents inThese results highlight the need for better measures of an increasingly diverse set of non-Western financial activities.