AIDDATA, a research lab at William & Mary, published in November 2023 a massive 393-page study titled "Belt and Road Reboot: Beijing's Bid to De-Risk Its Global Infrastructure Initiative" by Bradley C. Parks, Ammar A. Malik, Brooke Escobar, Sheng Zhang, Rory Fedorochko, Kyra Solomon, Fei Wang, Lydia Vlasto, Katherine Walsh, and Seth Goodman.
The study concludes that Beijing's annual international development finance commitments--mostly other official flows (OOF) and much less overseas development assistance (ODA)--have not plummeted to nearly zero as some reporting has suggested. In spite of recent declines in lending, China remains the world's single largest source of international development finance. China's ODA and OOF commitments to low- and middle-income countries are now hovering around $80 billion a year.
Comment: the study is not, however, organized on a geographical basis and Chinese loans only to Africa have fallen to about $1 billion annually in recent years, down from a high of $28 billion in 2016. The drop in Chinese loans has had a much greater impact on Africa than on the rest of the Belt and Road Initiative countries. End Comment
By comparison, due in large part to the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation's financing of private sector projects, Washington now provides about $60 billion of development finance each year to low- and middle-income countries.
In an effort to de-risk financing, China is ratcheting down its use of the policy banks--China Export Import Bank and China Development Bank--while ratcheting up its use of state-owned commercial banks, such as ICBC and Bank of China. Beijing is putting in place increasingly stringent safeguards to shield itself from the risk of not being repaid. Comment: This accounts for much of the sharp drop in recent lending to countries in Africa.
