winslowalrob/China-Investment-Tracker

Openly licensed database of Chinese foreign direct investment in Africa, Europe, and the United States. Chinese in Africa/Africans in China Research Network. # Chinese FDI Tracker An openly licensed database of Chinese foreign direct investment, built and maintained by the Chinese in Africa/Africans in China (CA/AC) Research Network. ## Why this exists The volume of Chinese economic activity in Africa, Europe, and the U.S. is frequently cited, but it is unclear if it is reliably measured. Foreign direct investment is an equity relationship: it confers ownership, a claim on future profits, and influence over management. Many existing datasets on Chinese activity in Africa measure something else, that being policy bank-financed contracting, often for infrastructure. That is a real economic transaction, to be sure, but it is not investment. A firm paid to build a railway does not own the railway. A government that borrows to finance construction has acquired debt, and it is the government that is the investor in this case, not the firm. When these are summed into a single figure and reported as investment, the resulting picture is systematically incorrect about who owns what, and why. Any analysis built on this inherits this category error. There are reliable datasets on Chinese lending globally, such as SAIS-CARI/BU GDPC. The same cannot be said about investment, though. This tracker is therefore designed to complement the lending datasets such as SAIS-CARI/BU GDPC rather than to compete with them. This project captures the equity. Read together, they describe the full scale of Chinese economic engagement. The output will be free and publicly available, to scholars, government officials, practitioners, journalists, and anyone else who needs it. ## How it will be built The tracker draws on three source families, each addressing a different part of the population. ### Chinese corporate reports Chinese firms describe their overseas projects, including location, in the text of their annual reports. A-share reports are published in simplified Chinese and H-share reports in traditional Chinese and English. This source …