Over the past two decades, China has become a major global lender, with outstanding debt claims from direct loans and trade advances alone exceeding 1.5 percent of world GDP. This surge in lending has financed many projects in infrastructure, mining, and energy. The problem is that there is little official data beyond those aggregate numbers, mainly because China has not released a breakdown of its lending activities.

In Horn, Reinhart, and Trebesch (2019), we address these data shortcomings and construct a database of Chinese loans with corresponding debt service and debt stock estimates by country and year. Our “consensus dataset” is granular and was gathered from an extensive list of sources, including international treaties, debt contracts, policy reports, as well as the work of academics such as the AidData team at William and Mary (Dreher et al. 2017). We collated details on 5,000 loans and grants extended by the Chinese government and state-owned creditor agencies since 1949, to more than 150 countries worldwide, with total commitment amounts of US$520 billion.

Paper by the Centre For Global Development