Building Bridges or Breaking Bonds? The Belt and Road Initiative and Foreign Aid Competition

Vadlamannati, Krishna Chaitanya; Li, Yuanxin; Brazys, Samuel; Dukalskis, Alexander

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3329502

Cited by 28 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 81 publications

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“…While trust funds play an increasingly prominent role in bilateral aid activity (Eichenauer and Reinsberg, 2017) Snidal 1985). As the rise of new donors such as China puts pressure on existing policy practices (Humphrey and Michaelowa, 2019;Vadlamannati et al, 2019), this paper highlights the potential leadership role of the World Bank in shaping the foreign aid regime. By focusing on donor coordination as a stated World Bank policy goal, the paper also speaks to the role of bureaucratic expertise in determining policy actions by international institutions (Bauer and Ege, 2016;Johnson and Urpelainen, 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 92%

Multilateral Aid to the Rescue? Sectoral Fragmentation of Bilateral Development Aid and the Role of the World Bank

Steinwand

Reinsberg

2020

SSRN Journal

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Bilateral aid projects continue to proliferate in an uncoordinated fashion, leading to fragmented aid delivery, despite high-level political promises to reign in the practice. Frequently absent in the academic and policy debates is an exploration of which policy venues can be effective in changing donor behavior. In this paper, we explore the role of the World Bank in promulgating best practices and enhancing sectoral coordination among bilateral donors. The World Bank's size, policy clout, and its own publicly stated commitments should make it a prime candidate for enacting measures that can help reduce bilateral aid proliferation and fragmentation. We concentrate on sectoral aid allocations and identify possible venues through which the World Bank can affect bilateral donor behavior and increase allocative efficiency, including as Lead Partner, Balancer, and by leading by example through Best Practices. Based on project-level data from 1998 to 2013, we find that bilateral donors and the World Bank allocate projects in a complementary fashion into the same sectors. Furthermore, World Bank and bilateral project numbers move together, and there is some evidence that bilateral donors emulate World Bank behavior. There is no evidence that World Bank activities help to reduce bilateral aid fragmentation.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 92%

Multilateral Aid to the Rescue? Sectoral Fragmentation of Bilateral Development Aid and the Role of the World Bank

Steinwand

Reinsberg

2020

SSRN Journal

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“…Finally, China focuses on social and economic group‐based rights while traditional actors remain committed to individual rights (Goldman, 1983; Liu, 2023). In this context, the Chinese development model has often been understood as diverging or competing with the dominant model (Mohan & Power, 2008, p. 36; Naim, 2009; Kalathil, 2018; Vadlamannati et al., 2023) or offering alternative strategies to achieving sustainable development (Liu & Dunford, 2016; Liu et al., 2018; Song et al., 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pivot to the South: Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals through China's Belt and Road Initiative

McNicol

2024

Geography Compass

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Whilst China's aid and development model has been traditionally understood as divergent from the dominant post‐1945 liberal development model, scholars are also increasingly exploring convergence between features of the two development models. Recently, scholars from a range of disciplines including development studies, development geography and international (business, environment and legal) studies have explored a process whereby China's Belt and Road Initiative and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals converge (‘BRI‐SDG integration’). This paper brings these multidisciplinary strands of scholarship together and places them in dialogue with social sciences convergence theory to understand how BRI‐SDG integration aligns with or challenges previous conceptualisations of Chinese‐dominant development convergence. The paper first demonstrates that BRI‐SDG integration proposes a novel and deliberate convergence process ‐ which the paper names ‘complementary convergence’. However, BRI‐SDG integration also underscores the need for more multidirectional frameworks that reject Eurocentricity for evaluating the contemporary Chinese‐dominant relationship, and an enhanced focus on how China is influencing dominant development institutions. Finally, BRI‐SDG integration reiterates the methodological difficulties of delineating between ‘development models’ in an increasingly interrelated global governance of development.

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“…Xi's grand strategy is largely economic and political, and the Belt and Road Initiative ("BRI") is the foundation of his effort (Rolland 2017;Vadlamannati et al 2019;Wang 2016). The BRI, which was first announced in 2013 as the "One Belt, One Road" initiative, is China's massive investment and development plan to build and finance infrastructure projects in an effort to create a new "Silk Road," linking the economies of China, Central Asia, Russia, Africa and Europe (Vadlamannati et al 2019, 3, 5).…”

Section: The Sino-african Foreign Direct Investment Relationshipmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Aid dependence is a condition that emerges if a country receives so much aid that its government no longer has to perform core functions. This occurs because as countries receive more aid, they become dependent on it, causing government officials to "lose their capacity to think for themselves and thereby relinquish control" (Vadlamannati et al 2019).…”

Section: Additionally Many Bri Countries Assume Large Amounts Of Debt...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Conventional Wisdom Overturned: Chinese FDI and the Question of Trust

Daniel¹

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Building Bridges or Breaking Bonds? The Belt and Road Initiative and Foreign Aid Competition

Abstract: China's renewed prominence is the most important development in international relations in the 21 st century.

Cited by 28 publications

References 81 publications

Multilateral Aid to the Rescue? Sectoral Fragmentation of Bilateral Development Aid and the Role of the World Bank

Multilateral Aid to the Rescue? Sectoral Fragmentation of Bilateral Development Aid and the Role of the World Bank

Pivot to the South: Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals through China's Belt and Road Initiative

Conventional Wisdom Overturned: Chinese FDI and the Question of Trust

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