Chinese development assistance and household welfare in sub-Saharan Africa

Bruno Martorano (), Laura Metzger () and Marco Sanfilippo ()
Additional contact information
Laura Metzger: ETH Zürich, Center for Development and Cooperation (NADEL)
Marco Sanfilippo: University of Bari, Italy and IOB, University of Antwerp

No 2018-012, MERIT Working Papers from United Nations University - Maastricht Economic and Social Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (MERIT)

Abstract: By combining geocoded project-level data on Chinese development assistance with geocoded household-level data from the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS), we investigate the effect of Chinese project assistance on household welfare in 13 sub-Saharan African countries. We exploit the geographic proximity of household clusters across two different DHS survey waves (before and after the influx of Chinese aid) and use a difference-in-difference design in order to investigate the impact of Chinese aid on households' wealth and education. Our results consistently point to an overall positive effect of Chinese project assistance on household welfare: areas that receive Chinese projects are more likely to be wealthier, stay in school longer, and achieve a higher educational attainment than areas which did not receive such projects. Results are robust to various alternative model specifications.

Keywords: OECD-DAC; Aid Allocation; aid effectiveness; China; Africa; emerging donors; project level; household welfare; DHS; geocoded data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F35 O19 R20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-02-21
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 (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://unu-merit.nl/publications/wppdf/2018/wp2018-012.pdf (application/pdf)

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 (2019)
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:unm:unumer:2018012

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MERIT Working Papers from United Nations University - Maastricht Economic and Social Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (MERIT) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ad Notten ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).