Undermining conditionality? The effect of Chinese development assistance on compliance with World Bank project agreements

Mitchell Watkins ()
Additional contact information
Mitchell Watkins: SOAS University of London

The Review of International Organizations, 2022, vol. 17, issue 4, No 1, 667-690

Abstract: Abstract Does Chinese development assistance undermine recipient country compliance with DAC aid conditionality? I theorize that Chinese aid provides an outside option that weakens recipient countries’ incentives to comply with conditionality by decreasing their dependence on DAC donors and undermining the ability of DAC donors to credibly commit to the enforcement of aid agreements. I test the theoretical predictions using project-level data on government compliance with World Bank project agreements for a sample of 42 Sub-Saharan African countries from 2000-2014. The empirical analysis finds strong support for the hypothesis that Chinese development assistance decreases the likelihood of recipient country compliance with the conditions specified in World Bank project agreements. The results are robust to alternative measures of Chinese development assistance, potential sources of omitted variable bias, and an instrumental variable estimation strategy.

Keywords: China; Conditionality; Foreign aid; World Bank (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F35 F50 F53 O19 O55 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11558-021-09443-z Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
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:spr:revint:v:17:y:2022:i:4:d:10.1007_s11558-021-09443-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... iology/journal/11558

DOI: 10.1007/s11558-021-09443-z

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of International Organizations is currently edited by A. Dreher

More articles in The Review of International Organizations from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().