China has become a major player in sovereign lending towards Africa during the past two decades but has recently been faced with increasing defaults. A new African debt crisis is looming. • Differences in the motives of sovereign lending between China and Western creditor countries contribute...

This paper is one of the first to show systematically that the motives for sovereign lending to African countries differed considerably between China and Western countries during the last two decades. While Chinese lending mainly served its own economic or geopolitical objectives, which is...

We investigate the effects of aging on regional productivity growth, the mechanisms and the strength of which are not well-understood. We focus on two different manifestations of population aging—workforce aging and an increasing share of retirees—and investigate channels through which aging...