Africa Policy Insitute

Chinese infrastructure lending and Africa's global value chain participation

Over the years, China has become one of the world’s largest lenders, particularly to African countries

(Reinhart et al. 2020, Mihalyi and Trebesch 2023). Following a slowdown that began in 2017, Chinese

loans to Africa increased again in 2023 (Engel et al. 2024). Driven largely by the Belt and Road Initiative,

China's offi

cial overseas loans primarily target large infrastructure projects in areas such as transportation

and energy (McBride et al. 2023). Between 2007 and 2020, Chinese development banks provided 2.5

times more funding for public–private infrastructure projects in sub-Saharan Africa than the combined

total from the development banks of the US, Germany, France, and Japan, signi

cantly outpacing

multilateral development banks in this sector (Lee and Gonzales 2022). CEPR.

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