Jiajun Xu

China's Development Finance: What Issues for Reporting and Monitoring Systems?

This article explores the implications of Chinas rise for global reporting and monitoring systems (RMSs) in the field of development cooperation. Beyond its fast‐growing – albeit still modest – foreign aid, China has emerged in the last decade as a globally pre‐eminent source of development finance. While Chinas endeavours are comparable to previous rising powers that strived to build linkages into global commodity chains and to participate in advanced industrial and technology value creation, what makes China distinct from OECD capital providers is its unprecedented scale, cohesive state‐market banking and enterprise institutions, and extensive utilisation of official finance for risk‐taking. This poses an existential crisis for DACs ODA reporting system, helping to precipitate a wide‐ranging renovation process. Hence, Chinas intentions and capacities regarding the reporting and monitoring of its development finance have a potentially formative influence on the development of a new, wider DAC reporting system and on other international RMSs in the development finance field as well.

Advancing African agency in the new 2030 transformative development agenda

This paper explores the current transition from the MDG framework to the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) framework in the post-2015 development agenda, with specific emphasis on how the SDGs with their aim of ‘Transforming our World’ might guide economic development and policy in Africa. The aim is to investigate the scope and implications of the post-MDG Agenda for Africa against the background of distinct disparities in development progress across the African continent, rapid urbanization, the availability of new technologies, and the emergence of parallel comprehensive new frameworks for managing global climate change and for creating synergies between China’s transformation over the coming decades and Africa’s Agenda 2063. Drawing on the changing shape of development finance and new insights into the role of public entrepreneurship for development, we make proposals for advancing African agency in the context of these new frameworks, and conclude with policy recommendations for the future.