Does 'soft power' matter in international relations? Specifically, when the U.S. seeks cooperation from countries around the world, do the views of their publics about U.S. foreign policy affect the actual foreign policy behavior of these countries? We examine this question using multinational surveys covering 58 countries, combined with information about their foreign policy decisions in 2003, a critical year for the U.S. We draw our basic conceptual framework from Joseph Nye, who uses various indicators of opinion about the U.S. to assess U.S. soft power. But we argue that his theory lacks the specificity needed for falsifiable testing. We refine it by focusing on foreign public opinion about U.S. foreign policy, an under-emphasized element of Nye’s approach. Our regression analysis shows that it has a significant and large effect on troop commitments to the war in Iraq, even after controlling for various hard power factors. It also has significant, albeit small, effects on policies towards the International Criminal Court, and on voting decisions in the U.N. General Assembly. These results support our refined theoretical argument about soft-power: Public opinion about U.S. foreign policy in foreign countries does affect their policies towards the U.S., but this effect is conditional on the salience of an issue for mass publics.

In Search of Soft Power: Does Foreign Public Opinion Matter for U.S. Foreign Policy

A popular identification strategy in non-experimental panel data uses instrumental variables constructed by interacting exogenous but potentially spurious time series or spatial variables with endogenous exposure variables to generate identifying variation through assumptions like those of differences-in-differences estimators. Revisiting a celebrated study linking food aid and conflict shows that this strategy is susceptible to bias arising from spurious trends. Re-randomization and Monte Carlo simulations show that the strategy identifies a spurious relationship even when the true effect could be non-causal or causal in the opposite direction, invalidating the claim that aid causes conflict and providing a caution for similar strategies.

Revisiting the effect of food aid on conflict : a methodological caution

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/176904/1/cesifo1_wp6885.pdf

The Effects of Foreign Aid on Refugee Flows

This chapter discusses the political, economic, and humanitarian motives driving Chinese aid. Concerning the political drivers, the Chinese government uses aid as a foreign policy tool, which should help the country to create a favorable international environment for China’s development, support the country’s rise to global power status, influence global governance, and reward countries that abide by the One-China Policy. Moreover, aid has increasingly been used to promote trade with developing countries and loans are extended in exchange for natural resources. Finally, China emphasizes that it gives aid in order to help other developing countries to reduce poverty and improve people’s livelihoods, a claim supported by the data as poorer countries receive more support. While the mixture of political, economic and humanitarian goals does not set China apart from the so-called “traditional” Western donors, China differs in the detailed content of its interests and the explicit emphasis on “mutual benefit” in the pursuance of its goals. Acknowledgements: Excellent research assistance was provided by Samuel Siewers and Felix Turbanisch. We further thank Jamie Parsons for proof-reading of an earlier version of this chapter. This is a draft chapter. The final version will be available in the Handbook of the International Political Economy of China edited by Ka Zeng, forthcoming, Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd The material cannot be used for any other purpose without further permission of the publisher, and is for private use only.

The motives of China’s foreign aid

This paper studies the causal effect of transport infrastructure on the spatial concentration of economic activity. Leveraging a new global dataset of geo-located Chinese government-financed projects over the period from 2000 to 2014 together with measures of spatial inequality based on remotely-sensed data, we analyze the effects of transport projects on the spatial distribution of economic activity within and between regions in a large number of developing countries. We find that Chinese-financed transportation projects reduce spatial concentration within but not between regions. In line with land use theory, we document a range of results which are consistent with a relocation of activity from city centers to their immediate periphery. Transport projects decentralize economic activity particularly strongly in regions that are more urbanized, located closer to the coast, and less developed.

Connective Financing - Chinese Infrastructure Projects and the Diffusion of Economic Activity in Developing Countries

The effects of trade, aid, and investment on China's image in Latin America

One goal of China’s Go Out policy is to create goodwill in countries around the world. At the same time, China’s growing economic engagement has provoked much criticism. This paper is the first to study whether these activities change the attitudes of individuals in developing countries towards China at both the national and subnational level. Using repeated cross-sectional survey data from the Latinobarometro, we analyze whether and how growing amounts of exports, foreign aid, and foreign direct investment from China to Latin America affect opinions on China within 18 Latin American countries over the 2002-2013 period. We run instrumental-variables regressions by exploiting exogenous variation in the supply of Chinese exports, aid, and investment proxied by China’s market penetration of developing countries outside Latin America. In contrast to the widespread criticism, we do not find evidence that China’s growing economic activities in the respective countries deteriorate average attitudes towards China—neither at the national nor the provincial level. However, our results show that the young, educated, and economically privileged population develops more positive views of China. We interpret this as evidence that China’s economic engagement creates winners and losers.

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Lutz Brückner

Papers

The effects of trade, aid, and investment on China's image in Latin America

The Effects of Trade, Aid, and Investment on China's Image in Developing Countries

The Causal Effects of Trade, Aid and Investment on China's Image Abroad