Chinese official finance and political participation in Africa

Can Aid Buy Foreign Public Support? Evidence from Chinese Development Finance

“…The effect at the province level is negative and statistically significant at conventional levels (as shown in columns 1, 3, and 5), which suggests that those living in close proximity to Chinese development projects (i.e., those who have more project exposure and knowledge) develop less favorable views of the Chinese government, compared to the average effect in the same country and year. This finding is consistent with previous research that provides evidence of higher levels of corruption, political capture, ethnic tension, social protest, and environmental degradation in areas within close proximity of Chinese development projects (Isaksson and Kotsadam 2018a,b, Dreher et al 2019, Isaksson 2020, Iacoella et al 2021, Baehr et al 2022. The effects will be passed through with the same sign if the corresponding firststage regression is sufficiently strong and the coefficients on our instrument are positive, as expected.…”

“…They also add to a growing strand of research that measures the intended and unintended effects of Chinese development finance. Recent work has shown that Chinese development projects increase economic growth and reduce the spatial concentration of economic activity, but they also fuel local corruption, stoke ethnic tensions, weaken trade union participation, instigate public protests, and degrade the natural environment (Isaksson and Kotsadam 2018a,b, Gehring et al 2019, Isaksson 2020, Iacoella et al 2021, Baehr et al 2022). 12 Likewise, recipient governments seem to benefit from these projects as they can steer funds to politically consequentially jurisdictions in order to advance their electoral interests , Anaxagorou et al 2020.…”

Mapping the risks of China’s global coastal development to marine socio-ecological systems

“…For example, several Indigenous communities surrounding development projects in Côte d'Ivoire are estimated to consume more than 1000 tons of seafood per year, yet the habitats they rely on are facing some of the greatest ecological risks from development. China's overseas development projects have a history of social conflict and protest 38 , and conflicts are already commonplace in coastal seas between competing users and resource uses 39 . Marine policy has struggled to fully incorporate the social sciences into evidence-based decision making 40 , and as more countries increase political recognition of coastal Indigenous communities' rights over their historical marine resources 41 , there is an urgent need to ensure Chinese DFIs consider the implications of overseas coastal development through a lens of social equity and responsibility.…”

Environmental risks and power plant suspensions

“…We hypothesize that the presence of environmental protests near the power project is positively related to the suspension risk of a project. We use protest data from Google's Global Database for Events, Language and Tone (GDELT) project-currently the most powerful research tool to analyse the occurrence of protests globally-that monitors the world's news media in print, broadcast, and web formats in over 100 languages from 1979 onwards (Brancati and Lucardi, 2019;Iacoella et al, 2021;Manacorda and Tesei, 2020). To measure the recent environmental movement intensity around each power project, we follow Iacoella et al (2021) to construct a dummy variable for each project at sample year t that indicates if there was at least one environmental protest recorded nearby in either year t or year t-1 within a 50 km buffer zones.…”

“…entities for whom environmental and ecological issues are their primary focus, such as wildlife preservation and climate change. We follow Iacoella et al (2021) to match the geocoded information of protest events with power projects' 50 km buffer zones and construct a dummy variable to indicate whether environmental protests were recorded over the past two years within the defined buffer zones. For example, the variable equals one in sample year t if there was at least one environmental protest recorded in 50km buffer zones surrounding the power project in either year t or year t-1.…”