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New study uncovers China ’s massive hidden lending to poor countries

July 20, 2019

New report shows the extent of China’s hidden power as the developing world’s creditor.

Over 50 developing countries’ Chinese debt accounts for on average 15 percent of their individual GDP.
New report shows that the majority of the world’s developing country’s debt to China is considered “hidden.”
China’s loans for poor countries are primarily for crucial infrastructure.

China’s overseas lending, which was virtually zero before the turn of the century — well, about $500 billion in 2000 — stands today, ostensibly, at around $5 trillion. Indeed, they are now the world’s largest creditor, being twice as large as both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, combined.

As much of what China does is under a veiled curtain of secrecy, it’s been difficult to track how all the money is flowing. A new comprehensive study though, by Sebastian Horn and Christoph Trebesch of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, and Carmen Reinhart of Harvard University, has provided some new insights about China’s official credit lending empire. What did the researchers discover?

More than half of China’s lending to developing countries is what they term “hidden” money — loans that haven’t been reported to any of the international funds, such as the World Bank.

Indeed, economist and author of the report, Tresbesch, recently told Germany’s Spiegel in an interview following the release of the study’s findings, that compiling all of the information was like “a kind of economic archeology.” Their information came from numerous financial world databases, along with some documents provided courtesy of the CIA.

It’s no secret that China would like to keep this type of information occluded from the international scene. Opponents of China’s secretive lending practices fear that Beijing is engaging in predatory debt diplomacy and using their worldwide Belt and Road Initiative to create a new kind of economic colonialism over Africa and other parts of the developing world.

China’s creditor strategy for economic growth

China is in a state of further economic evolution. Long gone are the days of being the world’s impoverished manufacturer. With a thriving consumer market boosted at home, China is now flexing their influence over vast swathes of the world. One of their strategies is by becoming the world’s most involved lender to poor countries.

This can be problematic for a number of reasons. Countries that take this deal, end up grossly indebting themselves to China’s policies in a number of ways, both monetarily and culturally. An example on the extreme end of the spectrum is Djibouti, whose Chinese debt is equivalent to 70 percent of the country’s GDP. On average, the top 50 of China’s borrowers owe somewhere near 15 percent of their GDPs, which, still, on a global scale is quite a lot.

The authors also found that China has never officially disclosed any loans to Iran, Venezuela, or Zimbabwe, which on other records it’s been shown that China is a major creditor. The report speculates that one of the ways to avoid these international cross-border crediting claims is by the Chinese government disbursing loans straight to Chinese contractors rather than the developing governments themselves.

A great deal of these loans isn’t subject to credit rating agencies, because most of China’s foreign loans flow straight from their government. China’s lending practices take on another interesting dynamic, as the country is lending much more than just money: it is also helping build crucial infrastructure in these developing nations. In doing so, China exports a healthy dose of its culture and influence.

Growing influence in Africa

China’s investment in Africa takes the form of loans in exchange for infrastructure development. Oftentimes, Chinese companies and citizens reap the benefits and profits of these large projects. While many Africans welcome the much-needed investment into their countries, it’s not clear how much the continent is benefiting from this Chinese influence.

One major issue a lot of countries are facing is that almost the entirety of their country’s debt load comes from China. For example, of Kenya’s $50 billion in debt, more than 72 percent of it is from China. In Senegal, highways, industrial parks and other crucial developmental projects for a functioning country are all funded by large, risky Chinese loans. Again, much of this value goes back to China. They’re not doing this for humanitarian reasons. The Chinese expect capital and cultural return.

Tim Wegenast, who wrote a report about Chinese mining in Africa states:

“It’s more or less safe to say that Chinese companies employ less local labor than other companies because they bring over many Chinese workers, and when they develop local infrastructure, they provide countries with loans which are being used to pay for it, which is then constructed by Chinese companies and Chinese labor.”

A future of Chinese credit

According to The Economist, China’s lending prowess is more of a mixed bag. While many new loans from China were offloaded with debt relief by Western creditors after defaulting, China has in the past put forth some debt restructuring plans on 140 of their foreign loans. Although at other times, they’ve taken their collateral with ruthless abandon, for example when they seized the Hambantota Port in Sri Lanka.

Many Chinese loans have higher extended interest rates and short maturities, with heavy collateral that includes commodities, or even important strategic foreign infrastructure.

The authors of the report noted that China has started talking about being more transparent and sustainable on their loans in the future. But no clear evidence of this taking place has yet to materialize.

Mike Colagrossi is a Columnist at Big Think Magazine

Charles Rapulu Udoh

Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based Lawyer with special focus on Business Law, Intellectual Property Rights, Entertainment and Technology Law. He is also an award-winning writer. Working for notable organizations so far has exposed him to some of industry best practices in business, finance strategies, law, dispute resolution, and data analytics both in Nigeria and across the world.

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Why Investors Should Go Beyond African GDP

July 14, 2019

By PAULO GOMES

Amid bleak GDP-based forecasts of Africa’s economic performance, some investors are tempted to write off the entire continent. But those who seize opportunities to gain an accurate and nuanced picture of Africa’s economic performance and prospects could reap vast rewards.

Gross domestic product has been the ultimate measure of an economy’s welfare for over 80 years. But, as the world’s economies become increasingly complex and technology-focused, economists are increasingly questioning GDP’s usefulness as a gauge of an economy’s health, with some arguing for a radically new approach. Africa’s experience shows why such an approach is badly needed.

Africa has long suffered as a result of GDP’s shortcomings. In January, the global credit-ratings agency Fitch Solutions forecast that while Africa’s GDP growth will average 4.5% annually over the next decade, its average GDP per capita will stagnate. But such bleak projections are misleading – and threaten to drive away investors.

The first problem with GDP projections for Africa is that they are based on scarce data. The majority of the continent’s national statistics services are underdeveloped. They lack sufficient funding and independence to acquire comprehensive data and calculate benchmark economic indicators. In other words, official GDP figures may be very wrong.

Consider Nigeria, which in 2014 overhauled its GDP data for the first time in over two decades. Such “rebasing” – needed to capture structural changes to the economy – should take place every five years or so. But Nigeria’s national statistical agency had lacked the funding, data, and political will to rebase regularly. When it finally did, GDP skyrocketed to $510 billion, nearly double the previous estimate of $270 billion. With that, Nigeria overtook South Africa as the continent’s largest economy.

The fact that much of economic activity in Africa occurs in the informal sector further undermines the reliability of GDP statistics. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the informal economy accounts for two-thirds of all employment; in cities such as Kampala and Dakar, that figure reaches or even exceeds 80%. In Nigeria, the informal sector represents 50-65% of total economic output. A metric that fails to measure so much economic activity can’t possibly be a sound basis for investment decisions.

Even if the country- and continent-level GDP averages were more reliable, they would amount to a cumbersome guide for investors, especially given how large and diverse Africa is. In fact, African countries with vastly different GDPs may share more – and more important – features than countries with similar GDPs.

For example, Namibia’s diversified economy has more in common with South Africa, a country with nearly 30 times the GDP, than it does with Senegal, a country of similar economic size when measured by GDP. Nigeria’s GDP is far larger than Chad’s, yet their economies are often compared to each other because of the dynamics of their oil sectors. Such structural commonalities provide more nuanced insights for investors than ungainly GDP averages ever could.

But perhaps the best way to gain an appropriately nuanced understanding of African economies’ health and prospects is by focusing on their cities – the continent’s main engines of economic development. While 60% of Africans still live in rural areas, the continent is undergoing rapid urbanization. In the next 15 years, the world’s ten fastest-growing cities will all be in Africa. The economic output of Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city, is larger than that of Kenya, one of the continent’s most promising economies.

Already, some multinationals are using city-based models to guide their African investment strategies. They know that dismal national GDP averages can obscure pockets of increasingly prosperous consumers who are eager to purchase high-quality goods and services from abroad. So, when determining a market’s viability, they often focus on cities, considering diverse indicators like mobile-phone penetration, electricity usage, and Internet bandwidth.

One global packaged-food manufacturer, for example, has focused its Africa strategy on 15 cities that collectively represent about 25% of the total growth in packaged-food sales expected across Africa in the next five years. More broadly, foreign direct investment has been flowing primarily toward Africa’s four main megacities: Cairo, Johannesburg, Nairobi, and Lagos.

Of course, whether at the city or country level, comprehensive and reliable data are needed to provide a strong foundation for investment strategies. Private companies – including African tech startups – can take advantage of new technologies to help deliver this. For example, Terragon, a Nigerian data analytics firm, pulls data on mobile-phone usage and matches it against data provided by its business clients to produce insights about African consumers.

Investors who seize such opportunities to gain an accurate and nuanced picture of Africa’s economic performance and prospects could reap vast rewards. Those who write off the entire continent based on simplistic and incomplete GDP data will lose out.

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Paulo Gomes, a former executive director at the World Bank Group and principal adviser in Guinea Bissau’s Ministry of Finance, is the Founder of Constelor Investment and a co-founder of New African Capital Partners.

Kelechi Deca

Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry.

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Ethiopia Is Now $52 billion In Debt, Twice The GDP of Uganda

July 6, 2019

Ethiopia ’s debt profile is headed for another level. With over $52 billion debt, the country’s public debt is now more than 65% of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and twice the GDP of the East African country of Uganda.

“We borrowed a lot of money but we have been unable to repay on the given time… We have borrowed significantly for infrastructure projects which really failed to achieve the desire result,” said Eyob Tekalign, State Minister of Finance of Ethiopia who presented the 11 months performance report to the Parliament.

What This Means

Although Ethiopia’s fast economic growth registered for over a decade was attributed to being driven by the public investment mainly relying on loan, the economic growth has not been able to make the country pay back its debt.
The Ethiopian government total debt from foreign and local lenders now surpasses $52.3 billion.
As a result, Ethiopia is now forced to restructure the debt repayment schedule negotiating with the major leading country — China as well as by avoiding new debts and new public investment projects

“We have already avoided commercial loans because these loans when they have matured have really created a challenge of accumulated debt,” he said explaining some of the actions undertaken by the ministry as a result of the ongoing reform launched by Prime Minister Abiy a year ago.

“…We have prioritized supply side of economic growth which means working on productive sectors including mining, tourism, manufacturing even agriculture. We are still importing wheat and edible oil which in an economy like Ethiopia is really unacceptable” the Minister said.

The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in Ethiopia was worth $80.56 billion in 2017. This year the government expects 9.2 percent growth through the economy of the highly indebted east African country has been not doing so well as a result of the internal political crisis and instability.

Charles Rapulu Udoh

Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based Lawyer with special focus on Business Law, Intellectual Property Rights, Entertainment and Technology Law. He is also an award-winning writer. Working for notable organizations so far has exposed him to some of industry best practices in business, finance strategies, law, dispute resolution, and data analytics both in Nigeria and across the world.