Chinese development assistance and household welfare in sub-Saharan Africa

Bruno Martorano (), Laura Metzger and Marco Sanfilippo

No 2019/09, RSCAS Working Papers from European University Institute

Abstract: We combine data on Chinese development projects with data from Demographic and Health Surveys to study the impact of Chinese aid on household welfare in sub-Saharan Africa. We use a novel methodology to test the effect of Chinese aid on three important development outcomes: education, health, and nutrition. For each outcome, we use difference-in-difference estimations to compare household areas near Chinese project sites to control areas located farther away, before and after receiving Chinese aid. This empirical strategy rules out many confounding factors that can bias measuring the impact of Chinese aid on our outcome variables. First, we find that Chinese projects significantly improve education and child mortality in treatment areas, but do not significantly affect nutrition. Second, social sector projects have a larger effect on outcomes than economic projects. Third, we do not find significant effects for projects that ended more than five years before the post-treatment survey wave. Our results are robust to a host of robustness checks.

Keywords: aid effectiveness; Chinese aid; household welfare; DHS; geocoded data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F35 O19 R20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-dev and nep-ppm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://cadmus.eui.eu/bitstream/handle/1814/60800/R ... quence=1&isAllowed=y (application/pdf)
http://hdl.handle.net/1814/60800 (text/html)

Related works:
Journal Article: Chinese development assistance and household welfare in Sub-Saharan Africa (2020)
Working Paper: Chinese development assistance and household welfare in sub-Saharan Africa (2018)
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:rsc:rsceui:2019/09

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in RSCAS Working Papers from European University Institute Convento, Via delle Fontanelle, 19, 50014 San Domenico di Fiesole (FI) Italy. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by RSCAS web unit ().