Do authoritarian regimes receive more Chinese development finance than democratic ones? Empirical evidence for Africa

- My results suggest that Chinese official development finance does not systematically flow to more authoritarian countries
- This study utilizes the new and comprehensive V-DEM dataset in the analysis of political systems in Africa
- The major determinant for Chinese development finance in Africa is the (non)-recognition of Taiwan as diplomatic partner
- The results stand up to several robustness checks, including fixed effects, random effects and instrumental variable estimation.

This study is part of an emerging literature that aims to shed light on China's development finance activities in Africa using quantitative estimation techniques. This paper empirically investigates whether African authoritarian regimes receive more Chinese development finance than democratic ones. I use four different measures of democracy/autocracy which allows me to check whether my results depend on the specific indicator chosen. The OLS results suggest that Chinese development finance does not systematically flow to more authoritarian countries, controlling for strategic, economic, political, institutional and geographic confounding factors. The results are not driven by the specific democracy indicator used in the analysis. The findings remain virtually unchanged if I reduce the sample to Sub-Saharan Africa only. Furthermore, the results stand up to several robustness checks, including FE, RE and instrumental variable estimation.