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Blog Post
October 19, 2020
As the possibility of a new Cold War between the US and China gains traction in some foreign policy circles, the scale of Chinese development finance has taken center stage. A closer examination suggests the cost to China of this lending is distinctly underwhelming. It would be cheap for the US and ...
Blog Post
June 25, 2020
China’s policy commitment to development ranks 35th of the 40 countries in the CDI. Some of the results may seem counterintuitive: Most people know that China provides major levels of finance to Africa, and that it’s a big producer of greenhouse gases. However, after we take account of country ...
Blog Post
May 07, 2020
Last year, economists Sebastian Horn, Carmen Reinhart, and Christoph Trebesch put forward estimates of the Chinese government’s external (“overseas”) lending in a working paper. Their work was a landmark effort in a number of respects. Perhaps not surprisingly for a working paper, Horn et al. a...
Blog Post
April 07, 2020
We are so accustomed to the Chinese government’s lack of transparency that the opaqueness of China’s overseas loans seems unremarkable at this point. But as we face what inevitably looks like a global debt crisis, one that is likely to hit low-income countries particularly hard, a clear accounting o...
Blog Post
March 17, 2020
Since the COVID-19 outbreak began in Nov. 2019 in Hubei Province, China, business activity in the world’s second-largest economy has ground to a halt. China’s small and medium enterprises (SMEs), which generate 90% of employment, constitute 80% of exports, and account for 70% of GDP, have been hit p...
Blog Post
February 19, 2020
Increasingly, Washington views international financial organizations as weapons in the global struggle for the neoliberal economic model against China’s state-led approach to development. And often, the international financial institutions are the battlefield itself, in a conflict over voting s...