China's overseas lending

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Horn, Sebastian; Reinhart, Carmen M.; Trebesch, Christoph
• 署名单位: University of Munich; Harvard University; University of Kiel
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-1996
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jinteco.2021.103539
• 发表日期: 2021
• 关键词: china; Trade finance; External debt; International capital flows; Official lending; Hidden debts; Sovereign risk; Belt and road initiative

摘要

Compared with China's pre-eminent status in world trade, its role in global finance is poorly understood. This paper studies the size, terms and destination of Chinese official international lending on the basis of a new consensus database of 4900 loans and grants to 146 countries, 1949-2017. Using the loan-level lending data we estimate outstanding debt stocks owed to China for more than 100 developing and emerging economies since 2000. As of 2017, China had become the world's largest official creditor, surpassing the World Bank and the IMF. The terms of China's state-driven international loans typically resemble commercial rather than official lending. We also find that 50% of China's official lending to developing countries is not reported in the most widely used official debt statistics. These hidden debts have important implications for debt sustainability. (c) 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).