Connective financing: Chinese infrastructure projects and the diffusion of economic activity in developing countries
研究中国资助的交通基础设施项目如何影响发展中国家内部经济活动的空间分布，发现这些项目使区域经济活动分散化，尤其在不发达、城市化程度高且靠近城市的地区效果更显著。
This paper studies the causal effect of transport infrastructure on the spatial distribution of economic activity within subnational regions across a large number of developing countries. To do so, we introduce a new global dataset of geolocated Chinese grant- and loan-financed development projects from 2000 to 2014 and combine it with measures of spatial concentration based on remotely sensed data. We find that Chinese-financed transportation projects decentralize economic activity within regions, as measured by a spatial Gini coefficient , by 2.2 percentage points. The treatment effects are particularly strong in regions that are less developed, more urbanized, and located closer to cities.