Can aid buy foreign public support? Evidence from Chinese development finance

Lukas Wellner, Axel Dreher, Andreas Fuchs, Bradley Parks and Austin M. Strange

No 2214, Kiel Working Papers from Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel)

Abstract: Bilateral donors use foreign aid to pursue soft power. We test the effectiveness of aid in reaching this goal by leveraging a new dataset on the precise commitment, implementation, and completion dates of Chinese development projects. We use data from the Gallup World Poll for 126 countries over the 2006-2017 period and identify causal effects with (i) an event-study model that includes high-dimensional fixed effects, and (ii) instrumental-variables regressions that rely on exogenous variation in the supply of Chinese government financing over time. Our results are nuanced and depend on whether we focus on subnational jurisdictions, countries, or groupings of countries.

Keywords: development finance; foreign aid; aid events; public opinion; government approval; soft power; China; Gallup World Poll (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F35 F59 H73 H77 O19 P33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna, nep-dev and nep-fdg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/251752/1/1796731544.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Can Aid Buy Foreign Public Support? Evidence from Chinese Development Finance (2022)
Working Paper: Can Aid Buy Foreign Public Support? Evidence from Chinese Development Finance (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:zbw:ifwkwp:2214

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Kiel Working Papers from Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().