‘Ground-Truthing’ Chinese Development Finance in Africa: Field Evidence from South Africa and Uganda
提出并实地测试了一种可复制的实地验证方法，通过在南非和乌干达的访谈和实地考察，验证了基于公开信息追踪中国发展融资数据的准确性，发现公开数据与官方受访者提供的信息高度一致。
A new methodology, Tracking Underreported Financial Flows (TUFF), leverages open-source information on development finance by non-transparent, non-Western donors. If such open-source methods prove to be valid and reliable, they can enhance our understanding of the causes and consequences of development finance from non-transparent donors including, but not limited to, China. But open-source methods face charges of inaccuracy. In this study we create and field-test a replicable ‘ground-truthing’ methodology to verify, update, and improve open-source data with in-person interviews and site visits in Uganda and South Africa. Ground-truthing generally reveals close agreement between open-source data and answers to protocol questions from informants with official roles in the Chinese-funded projects. Our findings suggest that open-source data collection, while limited in knowable ways, can provide a stronger empirical foundation for research on development finance.