Research On The Benefit Evaluation And System Optimization Of Chinese International Development Aid

The world is undergoing profound changes unseen in a century.The spread of the novel coronavirus pneumonia has made the international situation even more complicated.China is facing multiple challenges under the context of the transformation of the global political and economic order: enterprises encounter the difficulty of going global,international political game becomes increasingly complicated,and countries overseas widen the differences in image.It has become major propositions must be answered in China’s future reform and development about how to continue to promote China’s integration with the world economy,resolve international political game risks,and comprehensively display the country’s image.International development aid is a significant way for China to respond to global challenges.On the one hand,the transnational resources transfer brought by development aid can invigorate global poverty reduction and development,and help improve the development prospects of poor and vulnerable countries and regions.On the other hand,the development partnership established in the aid process can create space for China to continue participating in global competition and cooperation,which is beneficial to form a new development pattern where the domestic and international dual cycles can promote each other.Although the economic and social effects of development aid on recipient countries have been fully discussed in studies,in general,the impact of development aid on donor countries has not yet been fully and objectively assessed.In recent years,the scale of China’s foreign aid has been expanding,which makes it an important part of the international development aid system.However,for development aid,what we show in the field of discourse has formed a strong contrast with the fact that aid influence has continued to increase.It is believed by some international scholars and media that China’s aid serves for diplomatic policy and national interests,aiming at snatching resources rather than promote local development;while domestic people deem that development aid regardless of cost and conflicts with domestic development goals.Objectively assessing the effects of China’s foreign aid will help respond to doubts and criticisms from academics and people of aid behavior,creating conditions for the deep integration of China’s economy with the global economy,resolving the frictions and conflicts faced in the rise of major powers,and providing a comprehensive and real Chinese image.Based on the above theoretical and practical background,this thesis starts from clarifying the basic facts of China’s international development aid,ends with evaluating the benefits and returns of China’s international development aid,and systematically and comprehensively evaluates the impact of China’s aid on itself from three levels: economic benefits,political benefits,and social benefits.After systematically sorting out relevant domestic and foreign literature,first of all,based on existing research,this thesis establishes a theoretical analysis framework integrating economic benefits,political benefits and social benefits,evaluates the benefits of aid from the aspects of corporate overseas market behavior,international political bargaining power,and overseas country image.Second,from the theoretical perspectives of international resources transfer,global fiscal federalism,and global public goods,this thesis discusses the effectiveness of China’s international development aid and the mechanism of foreign aid affecting Chinese enterprises’ overseas market behavior,international political bargaining power,and the image of overseas countries.Third,it clarifies the basic facts of China’s foreign aid,and sorts out the historical evolution,basic conditions and implementation mechanisms of China’s foreign aid.Finally,on the basis of clarifying the mechanism of action,this thesis systematically assesses the benefits of China’s foreign aid using China’s aid data set(Aid Data),customs database,China Global Investment Tracker,United Nations General Assembly Voting data sets(United Nations General Assembly Voting Data)and African Barometer(African Barometer)data sets based on the objective facts of China’s foreign aid.The main research conclusions of the empirical part of the thesis are as follows:First,from the perspective of economic benefits,China’s foreign aid can promote the export and investment of Chinese enterprises.Development aid provides financing for international development cooperation.Emerging economies provide a new model that combines aid,trade and investment in the process of participating in global development cooperation.This thesis investigates the effectiveness of this model based on the objective reality of China’s foreign aid and corporate exports and foreign investment.It was found in the research that China’s foreign aid has promoted the increase in total exports and has no significant impact on total investment.Further inspection of the structure of exports and investment reveals that intermediate product exports and energy and mineral investment are greatly affected by aid funds.The results of the heterogeneity analysis show that different types of aid funds have different impacts on exports and investment.Official development aid lays a positive impact on exports,while other aid funds are more conducive to investment;the impact of aid on exports and investment is focused on the samples of countries with close development cooperation with China.The mechanism test found that foreign aid has created a good external environment for corporate exports and investment,and the country’s soft power is an important reason for foreign aid to promote Chinese enterprises’ overseas market behavior.The research conclusions of this thesis indicate that China’s foreign aid behavior is beneficial to the welfare of recipient countries,and it also brings economic benefits and returns to China.These findings provide theoretical and empirical support for China to continue to participate in international development cooperation.Second,from the perspective of political benefits,China’s foreign aid helps to enhance its own international political bargaining power.International political bargaining will affect the results of global development resource allocation.Developing countries are generally faced with challenges from international political bargaining power,which causes these countries to be at a disadvantage in global resource allocation.It was found in the existing research that developed countries will influence other countries’ behavior through foreign aid,so as to enhance their country’s international political bargaining power.However,there is still a lack of relevant evidence from developing countries.Based on the objective facts of China’s foreign aid and participation in global governance,this thesis examines the influence of aid from developing countries on the bargaining power of international politics.Studies have found that China’s foreign aid helps to enhance its own international political bargaining power.This effect is mainly in developing countries,especially samples with relatively low national per capita income.China has established development partnerships with these countries in the process of aid,which makes these countries adopt a position more similar to China in international politics.The results of mechanism analysis show that China’s foreign aid does not use Western countries’ “buy vote” mechanism to enhance its country’s international political bargaining power,but obtains the support of recipient countries through aid to establish a bilateral development community and enhance bilateral mutual trust.Finally,the research in this thesis finds that Chinese aid has widened the international political distance between recipient countries and the United States.Although Chinese aid can help itself cope with challenges from the United States,it still cannot offset the impact of US strategy and its international alliances.Third,from the perspective of social benefits,China’s foreign aid helps to improve China’s image as an overseas country.The image of overseas countries is becoming more and more important in the process of globalization.A positive country image will bring economic and trade benefits,while a negative country image may cause economic losses.Foreign aid is an important way to shape the image of overseas countries,but it is still unclear how foreign aid affects the views and evaluations of the recipient country’s people on the donor country.This thesis takes the distance between individuals and Chinese aid projects as the identification condition.The benchmark regression results prove that China’s foreign aid can improve the image of overseas countries,which is still valid after considering many missing variables.The mechanism inspection part found that China’s foreign aid is mainly to shape the image of China’s overseas countries by improving the economic and social conditions of the people in the aided areas.The results of heterogeneity analysis show that the effect of China’s foreign aid is more significant in urban samples,educated samples,and samples with richer social capital;if an individual believes that China’s economic aid is effective or that the United States has no actual impact on the country,the impact of aid will be more obvious.The spatial scope of the aid project’s impact is about 150 km.Once beyond this distance,it will no longer be significant.Aid to Africa provides materials for displaying China’s overseas country image.These findings indicate that Chinese aid helps to shape the image of overseas countries.China’s aid projects have created employment for the locals,improved the economic and social conditions of local people,and have also received positive comments from the public of recipient countries.Compared with the existing research,the innovations of this thesis are mainly reflected in the following three aspects: First,the theoretical framework of aid benefits has been established,and the benefits and returns of foreign aid have been comprehensively evaluated.Existing studies on the benefits and returns of international development aid mainly focus on the economic benefits of aid,that is,the impact on the export and investment of donor country,but ignore the political benefits and social benefits.This thesis first analyzes the economic benefits of aid from the perspectives of investment and export,then investigates the international political significance of aid from the perspective of international political game,and finally discusses the social benefits of aid based on China’s national image overseas.The second is to expand the research perspective of foreign aid and comprehensively analyze the mechanism of foreign aid’s benefits.On the one hand,the existing research on development aid mainly focuses on traditional donor countries.This thesis takes the most important countries among emerging donor countries as an example to investigate the economic and social effects of international development aid,which will contribute to the enhancement of understanding different aid models in academic and policy communities;on the other hand,there is a lack of existing research on the mechanism of aid income.This thesis discusses the mechanism of aid income both from the theoretical and empirical levels,which is very important for understanding the realization path of aid income in emerging donor countries,making up for the insufficiency of the research on aid benefit mechanism in the literature.The third is to improve the identification strategy of income evaluation,and obtain reliable causal effects.Most of the existing studies use the idea of instrumental variables to solve the endogenous problem,and then interpret the regression coefficients as causal effects.Based on the existing research,this thesis further adopts highdimensional fixed effects and geographic analysis methods to try to find new identification strategies and sources of variation,to improve the methodological deficiencies of existing studies.Combining the research conclusions of this thesis and the basic facts of China’s international development aid,this thesis proposes corresponding policy recommendations from the following aspects: the actual situation of fund supply capacity should be done within its capacity and must be combined with the actual needs of recipient countries to help recipient countries overcome obstacles to development and growth.Specifically,the first is to rely on foreign aid to strengthen bilateral political and economic ties,facilitate bilateral trade and investment,and promote the establishment of a fair and reasonable international political and economic order.The second is to expedite the establishment of a sovereign compatible international development aid system,strengthen multilateral policy communication in the field of foreign aid,give full consideration to the foreign aid behavior of other countries,and improve the consistency of development aid actions of countries around the world.The third is to consummate the risk and benefit assessment mechanism of China’s foreign aid,actively manage and control the risks of foreign aid projects,and enhance the transparency and targeting of foreign aid projects.