China's development model challenges the approaches of traditional Western donors like the World Bank. We argue that both aim at stability, but differ in the norms propagated to achieve that. Using fixed effects and IV estimations, we analyze a broad range of subnational stability measures in...

The political economy literature highlights the redistribution of resources to political support groups - often along regional or ethnic lines - as a dominant feature of political systems. Against this assumption, Kasara (2007) documents a puzzling result of discriminatory rent extraction by...

Wie die künftige Handelspolitik Europas aussehen oder in Sicherheits- und Klimafragen gehandelt werden sollte, ist aktuell zwischen Deutschland und Frankreich heftig umstritten. Diese Themen berühren im Rahmen der ganzheitlichen Agenda 2030 für nachhaltige Entwicklung auch die...

France and Germany face common issues in global development policy, including climate change, migration and security. At the same time, their aid is spread across similar countries and sectors. Based on a quantitative overlap measure, the study reveals that the Franco-German overlap of aid...

The political economy literature highlights the redistribution of resources to political support groups – often along regional or ethnic lines – as a dominant feature of political systems. Against this assumption, Kasara (2007) documents a puzzling result of discriminatory rent extraction by...

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, China’s mask and vaccine diplomacy have been widely discussed, but the debate relies on a few stylized data points. This article introduces a systematic way to measure China’s foreign aid in almost real-time through official customs records of...

This paper analyzes whether Chinese aid and other forms of official finance affect structural transformation in low- and-middle income countries. Specifically, we employ an instrumental variables (IV) approach to causally analyze the effect on the Economic Complexity Index of 98 recipient...

Using geo-referenced data on development projects by the World Bank and China, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the effect of aid on conflict using fixed effects and instrumental variables strategies. The results show that aid projects seem to reduce rather than fuel conflict, on average....

The future shape of European trade policy and the right stance to take in security and climate matters are currently the subject of fierce Franco-German debate. These issues are also relevant to development policy in the context of the overarching 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Despite...