TDF

Program Overview

Tracking underreported financial flows

As officially-reported Western aid becomes a smaller fraction of the total financing for sustainable development, AidData is pioneering new methods to track the large and growing number of development investments made by non-Western governments like China and Qatar, non-state actors like companies and private philanthropies, and low- and middle-income countries themselves.

AidData uses unique data and methods to answer a range of questions about these less understood global development actors:

What are their investment priorities?
How closely do their investments align with national development priorities and global goals?
In which countries and sectors are they most and least influential?
What are the intended and unintended effects of their investments?

Featured China Research

China's Public Diplomacy Toolkit

Quantifying Chinese public diplomacy in East Asia and the Pacific

Mapping China's Global Investments and Inequality

Geocoded Chinese development projects and the diffusion of economic activity in developing countries

China's Global Development Footprint

By the Numbers: The clearest look yet at Chinese official finance worldwide
‍

Featured Publications

Policy Report

Silk Road Diplomacy: Deconstructing Beijing's toolkit to influence South and Central Asia

Samantha Custer, Tanya Sethi, Jonathan A. Solis, Joyce Jiahui Lin, Siddhartha Ghose, Anubhav Gupta, Rodney Knight, Austin Baehr

2019-12-10

Policy Report

Influencing the Narrative: How the Chinese government mobilizes students and media to burnish its image

Samantha Custer, Mihir Prakash, Jonathan A. Solis, Rodney Knight, Joyce Jiahui Lin

2019-12-09

Policy Report

Ties That Bind: Quantifying China's public diplomacy and its "good neighbor" effect

Samantha Custer, Brooke Russell, Matthew DiLorenzo, Mengfan Cheng, Siddhartha Ghose, Jacob Sims, Jennifer Turner, Harsh Desai

2018-06-27

Working Paper

87

China and the World Bank: How Contrasting Development Approaches Affect the Stability of African States

Kai Gehring, Lennart Kaplan, Melvin H. L. Wong

2019-09-17

Journal Article

African leaders and the geography of China's foreign assistance

Journal of Development Economics

Axel Dreher, Andreas Fuchs, Roland Hodler, Bradley C. Parks, Paul A. Raschky, Michael J. Tierney

2019-04-23

Note: A version of this article was previously published as an AidData Working Paper.

Impact Evaluation

Parceling out prosperity? An impact evaluation of natural resource sector investments in Liberia

Brad Parks, Jonas Bunte, Harsh Desai, Kanio Gbala, and Daniel Miller Runfola

2019-02-19

Featured Blog Posts

August 2020

Chinese infrastructure investments shift economic activity, reduce spatial inequalities, finds new paper

The paper shows that Chinese projects relocate economic activity from city centers to peripheries.

Urael station of Addis Ababa’s Chinese-financed light rail. Photo by Nebyu derseh tenaw, licensed under (CC BY-SA 4.0).

March 2020

Powerful lessons for global development

How much foreign direct investment are China and Russia putting into low- and middle-income countries? How much of China’s foreign aid supports their own strategic economic development? These are just some of the questions students are helping to answer at AidData.

January 2020

How does China’s development model affect state stability in African countries?

Both World Bank and Chinese aid projects are associated with a reduction in violence against civilians, but regions with Chinese aid see an increase in government repression.