Electoral motives and the subnational allocation of foreign aid in sub-Saharan Africa
研究利用14个撒哈拉以南非洲国家2000-2012年的地理编码数据，发现非洲领导人将中国援助偏向政治支持者集中的地区，而世界银行援助则无此现象，且制衡机制能缓解这种不当分配。
This paper examines how electoral motives shape the subnational allocation of foreign aid commitments by employing a newly constructed geocoded dataset for 14 sub-Saharan African countries over the period 2000–2012. Our results provide strong evidence of a core voter strategy: African leaders diverting Chinese aid towards regions with a high concentration of political supporters. However, no evidence of such preferential treatment is found for World Bank aid, suggesting that aid from traditional donors is less vulnerable to political manipulation. Our results also reveal that checks and balances in recipient countries are an important mediating factor of aid misallocation: while copartisan regions receive larger amounts of Chinese aid in environments with weak checks and balances, these effects disappear when stronger checks and balances are in place. This paper also offers case study evidence from Ghana. Exploiting the 2009 regime change in Ghana and using a difference-in-differences framework, we provide further support of copartisan targeting and confirm that Chinese aid is more manipulable than World Bank aid in this respect.