Complementary or adverse? Comparing development results of official funding from China and traditional donors in Africa

Abstract

While China has become an important source of aid and other official funding for Africa, its coordination with other development partners remains limited, and its contribution to development has been questioned. Despite different development models represented by China and traditional donors, recent studies demonstrated that funding from the two has similar determinants, but little was done to systematically compare their role for development. The paper evaluate their impacts on infrastructure, governance, external debt sustainability and dependence on natural resources. Furthermore, we explore whether there are (dis)advantages from the presence of both donors. Overall, we find that China has similar, beneficial, impact when compared with traditional donors on all the development dimensions but debt. The presence of both donors, in turn, has a positive effect on debt sustainability, but negative impacts on the other dimensions. We interpret these results based on effective development cooperation principles of ownership, alignment, harmonisation, and accountability.