Chinese Aid and Democratic Values in Latin America

Andreas Freytag () and Miriam Kautz

No 9815, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: International economic engagement has been increasingly framed in terms of liberal democratic values. Specifically, Chinese aid has been at the center of this debate. Since Chinese aid comes with “no strings attached,” a popular narrative is that Chinese aid poses a challenge to conditional aid, thus weakening democracy promotion. This study aims to deepen our understanding of how democratic values are shaped by international economic engagement. Drawing on the Latinobarómetro Household Survey, we use an instrumental variable approach to test the effect of Chinese aid on attitudes toward democracy in 18 Latin American countries on the national and regional level. We find that Chinese aid has a non-negative effect on support for democracy. We also find that individuals who have a positive attitude towards China are more likely to value democracy. In contrast, positive attitudes towards the USA have no robust impact on support for democracy.

Keywords: China; Latin America; foreign aid; public opinion; support for democracy; values (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F35 F61 F69 O54 P33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp9815.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Chinese aid and democratic values in Latin America (2024)
Working Paper: Chinese Aid and Democratic Values in Latin America (2022)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_9815

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().