Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy

by Adam Tooze

The big new bilateral lender on the development finance scene was not an established member of the Paris Club. It was China. The precise scale and nature of China’s lending under the banner of the One Belt One Road infrastructure program was much debated, but it was clearly huge. Between 2008 and 2019, according to one particularly meticulous compilation, the China Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank of China lent $462 billion to clients all over the world.22 That was only a hair short of the $467 billion lent by the World Bank over the same period. And the Chinese banks had greater “surge” capacity. At its peak in 2016, lending by the Chinese policy banks not only exceeded that of the World Bank but matched that of all the multilateral development banks—the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the European Investment Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the African Development Bank—put together.23 Over 40 percent of the $30.5 billion of debt service payments due in 2021 from DSSI-eligible African nations was owed to either Chinese official creditors or China’s development banks.24 The forty-six debtor countries that had actually signed up to participate in DSSI owed China $5.76 billion in repayment, as compared to $1.99 billion owing to the Paris Club members.