Comparing US & chinese foreign aid projects around the world
overview
China funds foreign aid projects around the world, but with little transparency about who and what they’re funding. William and Mary went through thousands of articles and built an open source database to start categorizing their overseas activity.
We are interested in what correlations can be found when we pair this dataset with ones on US foreign aid funding, economic data, public health information, and others.
We’re currently building a visualization with the rankings of each country on elements of good governance from the World Bank, coronavirus cases from Johns Hopkins, and health and infrastructure data from the World Bank.
Image from Merics Research Institute
early insights
It’s interesting to note that several significant investments by China around the Indian and Pacific Oceans, which you can see in the visualization on the right, are not captured in any (that we could find) maps of the BRI projects.
Visualization Design by Lucas Erickson, Data by William and Mary