Recently, the paper Whose Aid will Promote the Industrial Development of Africa: China or the US? co-authored by Associate Prof. Xu Lihe and Prof. Sun Churen, together with Prof. Wu Wanji (International Business School of Southwestern University of Finance and Economics) has been selected as the 8th best Chinese paper among “The Top 10 Best Chinese Papers in International and Development Economics 2020”. This is the first paper from GDUFS selected into this list, which is a significant milestone and highlight of the development of World Economics as a discipline at GDUFS..

This paper was published in The Journal of World Economics, No. 11, 2020, and its summary was presented in The Yearbook of World Economy 2021 (China Social Sciences Press). The list of “The Best Papers in World Economics” included both Chinese and English papers, which were based on the number of their citations, votes received from experts, downloads and Journal impact factors, with corresponding weights of 0.6, 0.2, 0.1 and 0.1 respectively. The expert poll was organized by the editorial department of China Social Sciences Press and conducted by nearly 2,300 leading national economists and scholars in the field of world economics, including more than 400 executive directors of the first-class society “China Society of World Economics (CSWE)”. Besides, the poll was organized according to eight major sub-disciplines of world economics.

The paper was also reprinted by Renmin University of China in its World Economic Research Guide, No. 1, 2021. Based on the cross-country panel data on international assistance to Africa from 2000 to 2014, this paper examined the difference between the impact of “South-South assistance” represented by China and “North-South assistance” represented by the US on Africa’s industrial development. Taking the international assistance which Africa received from the EU, Japan, and the World Bank into consideration, for the same African country in the same period, China’s assistance was beneficial to industrial development in Africa, while US assistance was a constraint. The US assistance contributed to the development of service industry in Africa, while China had no significant impact on that. In conclusion, China’s assistance was beneficial to boosting African economic aggregates. Further examination of the action mechanism revealed that the technology gap between China and Africa was closer than that between the US and Africa, which would facilitate the improvement of local technology levels and bring robust development. Compared to international assistance, China’s assistance was more conducive to endogenous growth of African industries.

Brief Introduction

The Yearbook of World Economy is a national journal (CN11-3103/F), which was founded in 1979 and sponsored by the Institute of World Economics and Politics Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. It is one of the few academic yearbooks in China since 1949, and transformed into an academic evaluation yearbook since 2014.