Tracking Loans and Grants from China to Low-, Middle-, and High-Income Countries: An Application of AidData’s TUFF 4.0 Methodology

This publication provides a detailed guide to the 4.0 version of AidData’s Tracking Underreported Financial Flows (TUFF) methodology. The methodology codifies a systematic, transparent, and replicable set of procedures that facilitate the collection of information about aid and credit from official sector donors and lenders who do not publish comprehensive or detailed information about their overseas activities. It does so by synthesizing and standardizing vast amounts of unstructured, open-source, project-level information published by governments, intergovernmental organizations, companies, nongovernmental organizations, journalists, and research institutions. The authors of the publication explain how the latest version of the TUFF methodology was used to construct China’s Global Loans and Grants (CLG-Global) Dataset, Version 1.0 and its constituent datasets, the China’s Loans and Grants to Low- and Middle-Income Countries (CLG-LMIC) Dataset, Version 1.0 and the China’s Loans and Grants to High Income Countries (CLG-HIC) Dataset, Version 1.0.