Press Center

By Alex Lo  From the article:  Does China practise stealth imperialism by saddling developing countries with loans they can’t afford with its “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI) and compromising their sovereignty?  United States Vice-President Mike Pence made that controversial claim at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) summit in Papua New Guinea. “Know that the US offers a better option,” he told Apec. “We don’t drown our partners in a sea of debt, we don’t coerce, compromise your independence. We do not offer constricting belt or a one-way road.” Actually, his claim that the US doesn’t “coerce, compromise your independence” is demonstrably false, given the long history of American invasions, CIA-sponsored coups, assassinations, sanctions and subversion around the world. And there is a rich economic literature on the failures of Western aid in the third world. But let’s skip all that, since we are talking China.  ...  So who’s right? Actually, both are being disingenuous, but Pence has vastly exaggerated his claim. Fortunately, there are independent bodies that study these things. A recent study by a Washington-based think tank, the Centre for Global Development, studied the likelihood of debt problems in 68 countries identified as potential BRI borrowers. The centre’s board is headed by Lawrence Summers, the former US treasury secretary.  Its study concludes that only eight countries are at particular risk of debt distress: Djibouti, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, the Maldives, Mongolia, Montenegro, Pakistan, and Tajikistan. Surveying the whole range of borrowing countries in China’s sprawling infrastructure-financing programme, it concludes that the risk of widespread debt distress is unlikely. “The majority of BRI countries will likely avoid problems of debt distress due to BRI projects,” it concluded.  Read the full article here.

By Ryan Lenora Brown From the article: The Story was a magnet. The Story was a compass. And in Jalamang Danso’s hometown, The Story was dragging all of the young men away. The Story went like this: If you wanted to make a better life for your family, you had to leave. You had to cross the desert. You had to cross the sea. You had to get to Europe. “People will say, this country is dry. There is no promise here,” says Omar Jammeh, who leads a job-creation program here in Janjanbureh, an island in the Gambia River four hours drive west of the capital Banjul. “The only promise is in Europe.” … Almost everywhere, they point out – including in the European countries funding these new revenue projects in Africa – making poor people more prosperous has broadened their horizons, made them more mobile, and led to more people leaving, not less. It takes more than a generation to have the opposite effect, studies have shown. That was true in places like Sweden and Italy in the late 19th century and in Latin America in the late 20th century. And it’s likely to be true in sub-Saharan Africa as well, says Michael Clemens, co-director of migration, displacement, and humanitarian policy at the Center for Global Development, a think tank in Washington D.C. It “might be true in the long term that development will dissuade migration,” he says. “But what is understandably difficult for people to grasp is just how long the long term is.” In the meantime, he cautions, “as countries develop from poor to middle income … there will generally be more and more emigration.” Read the full article here.  

By Duncan Green  From the article:  Two recent assessments of aid donors used radically different approaches – a top down technical assessment of aid quality, and a bottom up survey of aid recipients. The differences between their findings are interesting. The Center for Global Development has just released a new donor index of Quality of Official Development Assistance (QuODA), with a nice blog summary by Ian Mitchell and Caitlin McKee. ‘How do we assess entire countries? One way is to look at indicators associated with effective aid. The OECD donor countries agreed on a number of principles and measures in a series of high-level meetings on aid effectiveness that culminated in the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness (2005), the Accra Agenda for Action (2008), and the Busan Partnership Agreement (2011). Our CGD and Brookings colleagues—led by Nancy Birdsall and Homi Kharas—developed QuODA by calculating indicators based largely on these principles and grouping them into four themes: maximising efficiency, fostering institutions, reducing burdens, and transparency and learning.’ Read the full article here.