Global China Data

The 1.0 version of this dataset won the prestigious “Best New Dataset Award” from the International Political Economy Society (IPES) in 2023.

This uniquely comprehensive and granular dataset captures 20,985 projects across 165 low- and middle-income countries supported by loans and grants from official sector institutions in China worth $1.34 trillion. It tracks projects over 22 commitment years (2000-2021) and provides details on the timing of project implementation over a 24-year period (2000-2023). An accompanying report, Belt and Road Reboot: Beijing’s Bid to De-Risk Its Global Infrastructure Initiative, analyzes the dataset and provides myth-busting evidence about the changing nature, scale, and scope of China’s overseas development program.

Additional Guidance

For the subset of grant- and loan-financed projects and activities in Version 3.0 of AidData's Global Chinese Development Finance Dataset that have physical footprints or involve specific locations, AidData has extracted point, polygon, and line vector data via OpenStreetMap URLs and provided a corresponding set of GeoJSON files and geographic precision codes. These geospatial data and precision codes are provided in AidData's Geospatial Global Chinese Development Finance Dataset, Version 3.0. Users of this dataset should cite Goodman, S., Zhang, S., Malik, A.A., Parks, B.C., Hall, J. (2024). AidData’s Geospatial Global Chinese Development Finance Dataset. Scientific Data 11, 529. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-024-03341-w

Version 3.0 of AidData's Global Chinese Development Finance Dataset captures the full range of emergency and non-emergency loan commitments (including PBOC swap borrowings) between 2000 and 2021. All of these observations are organized at the level of individual loan commitments (or borrowings). For a complete, country-year panel dataset and additional details on PBOC swap borrowings between 2000 and 2021, we encourage users to access the China as an International Lender of Last Resort Dataset and cite Horn, S., Parks, B., Reinhart, C. M., and Trebesch, C. (2023). China as an International Lender of Last Resort. NBER Working Paper No. 31105. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).