Chinese aid and health at the country and local level

• Verfasst von: Cruzatti, John [VerfasserIn]
• Verfasst von: Dreher, Axel [VerfasserIn]
• Verfasst von: Matzat, Johannes [VerfasserIn]
• Titel: Chinese aid and health at the country and local level
• Verf.angabe: John Cruzatti C., Axel Dreher, Johannes Matzat
• Verlagsort: Munich, Germany
• Verlag: CESifo, Center for Economic Studies & Ifo Institute
• E-Jahr: 2020
• Jahr: June 2020
• Umfang: 1 Online-Ressource (circa 49 Seiten)
• Illustrationen: Illustrationen
• Gesamttitel/Reihe: CESifo working paper ; no. 8352 (2020)
• Datenträger: Online-Ressource
• Sprache: eng
• Sach-SW: health aid
• Sach-SW: fungibility
• Sach-SW: infant mortality
• Form-SW: Graue Literatur
• K10plus-PPN: 170046485X

Abstract

We investigate whether and to what extent Chinese development finance affects infant mortality, combining 92 demographic and health surveys (DHS) for a maximum of 53 countries and almost 55,000 sub-national locations over the 2002-2014 period. We address causality by instrumenting aid with a set of interacted variables. Variation over time results from indicators that measure the availability of funding in a given year. Cross-sectional variation results from a sub-national region's "probability to receive aid." Controlled for this probability in tandem with fixed effects for country-years and provinces, the interactions of these variables form powerful and excludable instruments. Our results show that Chinese aid increases infant mortality at sub-national scales, but decreases mortality at the country-level. In several tests, we show that this stark contrast likely results from aid being fungible within recipient countries.