Conditionality in Chinese bilateral lending

Mikael Mattlin and Matti Nojonen

No 14/2011, BOFIT Discussion Papers from Bank of Finland Institute for Emerging Economies (BOFIT)

Abstract: China.s long insistence on non-interference and sovereignty and frequent criticism of Western in-terventionism has contributed to a widely held impression that China lends and invests abroad without attaching policy conditions. This discussion paper surveys the general policy debate on conditionality in lending, as well as China.s own debate on conditionality. We then examine bila-teral loans provided by Chinese state-owned policy banks, notably China Exim Bank, arguing that the assumption of China.s shunning conditionality is valid only if the term is taken narrowly to imply the specific set of policy conditions (e.g. privatisation and financial liberalisation) routinely called for by World Bank Group lenders. Based on a literature review and analysis of loan features along with tentative evidence from empirical cases of Chinese bilateral lending, we identify four hypothetical types of conditionality: political conditionality, embedded conditionality, cross-conditionality and emergent conditionality. In all likelihood the last three types of conditionality are not imposed by a unitary state actor, but emerge as an indirect consequence of the voluminous busi-ness activities of Chinese state-linked lenders and enterprises in developing countries.

Keywords: China; bilateral lending; conditionality; policy banks (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F34 F36 F59 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/212702/1/bofit-dp2011-014.pdf (application/pdf)

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:zbw:bofitp:bdp2011_014

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in BOFIT Discussion Papers from Bank of Finland Institute for Emerging Economies (BOFIT) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().