ABSTRACT Using data from the 2014 China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), this paper examines how clan culture influences trust in local government and explores the mechanisms underlying this relationship. The results show a significant positive effect: Stronger clan culture is associated with higher levels of trust in local government. Robustness checks and instrumentalvariable estimates corroborate the main findings. The mechanism analysis indicates that clan culture enhances trust in local government through three channels: strengthening collectivism, increasing interactions between government and local communities and improving the provision of village‐level public goods. However, these effects do not extend to improvements in institutional quality. The findings of this paper shed important light on how traditional clan culture can be effectively integrated into modern governance institutions in China.

ABSTRACT Food security has become a central pillar of China's international development cooperation. This paper quantifies the effects of Chinese agricultural aid on staple crop production in low‐ and middle‐income countries over 2002–2022, using project‐level data from AidData merged with FAOSTAT and World Bank indicators. We find that Chinese agricultural aid significantly increases the harvested area, yield and total production of legumes and tubers, while effects on cereals remain limited. Impacts are stronger when assistance is provided through grants and loans and in countries facing severe food insecurity, high social fragmentation or tight resource constraints. Beyond production outcomes, agricultural aid is associated with improvements in child, infant and maternal health in recipient countries and with an expansion of China's exports of agricultural inputs. Overall, the results highlight the role of Chinese agricultural aid in strengthening global food security while deepening real economic linkages between China and recipient economies.

ABSTRACT Mobile money—a digital financial service—has proliferated in many developing countries. Owing to its ability to reduce transaction costs and allow even the poor to be financially included, it has been widely adopted. While a growing body of literature has examined its welfare effects, its effects on diet quality of households and individuals are not yet well understood. Here, we evaluate the implications of mobile money on household and women's diets. We also explore several mechanisms. Using cross‐sectional data from rural Cameroon, we employ instrumental variable methods to control for potential endogeneity. Our results suggest that mobile money is positively associated with household diet quality but negatively associated with women's diet quality. The results further show that mobile money operates through increasing the likelihood of engaging in off‐farm employment and increased agricultural commercialization. These results imply that while mobile money could be promoted for improved household diet quality, it should be cautiously done owing to its negative associations with women's diets. In a broader sense, the results suggest that studies should look beyond the household and consider the implications on individuals, especially women who are usually more vulnerable and marginalized.

ABSTRACT The Finance Circuit model proposed by Keynes in 1936 was enhanced in 2017 with the introduction of the Post‐Keynesian Finance Circuit model (PKFC), which similarly neglects the relevance of Microfinance Banks (MFBs). As a consequence, there is a significant deficiency of theoretical and empirical evidence illustrating the potential of these models to propel economic growth in an environment dominated by MFBs. This paper seeks to fill the current gap by providing a unique opportunity to investigate and assess the role of MFBs within the context of the PKFC model. The research methodology involves a Granger noncausality test for heterogeneous panel data models using a sample of 25 African countries for the period 2005–2021. The results support the PKFC and the Modified PKFC models' causal relationships and recommend that to boost investment and economic growth, policymakers ought to implement the PKFC model and encourage the formal banks to facilitate the registration of significant MFBs.

ABSTRACT This paper builds on the work of a previous study to modelling the political economy factors that influence government take over the lifespan of mining projects. We extend the political economy model by incorporating the opportunity costs of preferences for side payments, thereby enhancing its predictive power to explain government take. Preferences for side payments are likely to exist only in contexts where government effectiveness is limited and corruption is rampant. Our empirical evidence using data on de jure government take in copper mining projects in Africa and Latin America confirms the theoretical predictions by the revisited political economy model. Specifically, we find that government effectiveness is a key driving factor with a two‐dimensional linkage. As government effectiveness improves, countries with high level of corruption experience lower government take, while those with high transparency and strong political regimes experience higher government take.

ABSTRACTThis article examines Triangular Cooperation, which is garnering popularity in the development sector and is purportedly devoid of the old hierarchies associated with international development. The article locates this emerging mode of cooperation in the context of discussions on decolonisation and turns attention to the need to update the registers used to critique international development. Through a critical discourse analysis of an array of project documents and a reflexive account of the author's experiences in the aid sector, it explores the subtle forms of power that play out when ‘pivotal’, ‘beneficiary’ and ‘facilitating’ partners enter a project. The article argues that such an enquiry helps nuance our examination of old hierarchies in contemporary times. It thereby calls for renewed attention to Triangular Cooperation in critical development studies that is currently preoccupied with South–South Cooperation.

ABSTRACTHow do emerging donors integrate into the existing international aid architecture? While the existing literature focuses largely on emerging donors from the Global South, such as Brazil, China, India and Russia, there are many emerging donors from the Global North that have joined the OECD's Development Assistance Committee (DAC)—the premier standard‐setting organization in international development cooperation. How do these new members integrate into the existing international aid architecture? We study this question by analysing the compliance of traditional and newer donors with standards and best practices set by the DAC. We argue that new donors are more likely to adhere to DAC statistical reporting requirements, while traditional donors are better at following substantive policy guidelines to achieve global policy goals. In particular, we posit that the Secretariat interacts differently with members depending on their status: With new donors, it tends to support the adoption of statistical standards, which are necessary to align aid‐giving practices with all other standards, while adherence with more substantive guidelines for aid effectiveness is scrutinized more closely for older members. We examine one mechanism that facilitates the integration of new DAC members: the Policy Marker System, an IO‐driven monitoring system whose functioning requires both compliance with statistical guidelines and the adoption of good practices in aid giving. Our analyses indicate that new donors are indeed more likely to comply with procedural reporting requirements, while traditional donors are more likely to implement the more substantive DAC recommendation of targeting aid towards certain priority policy areas.

No abstract is available for this article.

ABSTRACTThis paper investigates the causal impact of rainfall shocks on crime rates in Indonesia by utilising two novel crime data sources: newspaper reports and crime victimisation data from a household survey. By leveraging the income data from the household survey, this study directly tests the economic channel through which rainfall affects crime. The findings reveal mixed results depending on the data source. Newspaper reports indicate no relationship between rainfall shocks and crime incidents. In contrast, analysis using the crime victimisation data demonstrates that positive rainfall shocks reduce the probability of becoming a victim of any crime by 12% compared with negative rainfall shocks. This reduction is driven entirely by property crimes, with no impact observed on other types of crime. These results highlight the nontrivial role of economic conditions in influencing property‐related crime. I explore various reasons that may contribute to the different results between the two data sources.