This book provides a new perspective of China's controversial foreign aid strategy. The chapters offer a thorough examination of data to show how China has created knowledge in its long experiences of aid and how this accumulated knowledge could contribute to other developing countries. The book also examines China's aid philosophy and strategy through an Asian perspective, instead of the Western perspective that is postulated in existing academic literature. This is important as China shares a number of common features with other Asian donors, including India and Japan. Finally, the book explores how to utilize the potential effect of this rising major donor for worldwide development and poverty reduction.

This book brings fresh perspectives into the debate on aid effectiveness and aid relationships. Asia provides a varied picture with its combination of rapidly developing countries where aid plays a less central role such as China, Vietnam, and Thailand as well as more aid dependent countries such as Nepal, Sri Lanka and Mongolia.

Through comparative studies of aid supported infrastructure projects in East Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, the book examines how aid could assist development processes by facilitating development of local endogenous institutions, which are both pro-growth and pro-poor. Applying comparative institutional analyses based on the concept of endogenous institutions and institutional changes, and exploring the model of 'development cooperation', the book examines aid effectiveness in a broader context of institution development in the two regions. It offers a new perspective on the institutions-development nexus, alternative to the conventional one with its emphasis of an inevitable institutional convergence to a monolithic universal model. It argues that socially and politically sustainable development involves institutional innovation by developing endogenous institutions, firmly embedded in a local social-political system. The book offers policy lessons from the East Asian experiences with aid-supported infrastructure projects to governments in sub-Saharan Africa, the international aid community, including emerging development partners.

This book provides a new perspective of China's controversial foreign aid strategy. The chapters offer a thorough examination of data to show how China has created knowledge in its long experiences of aid and how this accumulated knowledge could contribute to other developing countries. The book also examines China's aid philosophy and strategy through an Asian perspective, instead of the Western perspective that is postulated in existing academic literature. This is important as China shares a number of common features with other Asian donors, including India and Japan. Finally, the book explores how to utilize the potential effect of this rising major donor for worldwide development and poverty reduction.

Through comparative studies of aid-supported infrastructure projects in East Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, the book examines how aid could assist development processes by facilitating development of local endogenous institutions.