Mapping China's Health Assistance Projects Overseas
ToolPublished Oct 22, 2024
China's role in international development has grown along with its global ambition. However, the lack of standardized reporting and limited transparency often challenge policymakers' and researchers’ efforts to understand China's global health projects and their impact. To address this challenge, a RAND team built the China’s Health Assistance Projects Overseas (CHAPO) and an associated web tool that enables interactive visualizations of China's health aid by recipient country and year, with descriptions for each project. The CHAPO web tool highlights projects that include China’s medical teams, which are the long-running flagship of China’s health aid, as well as the growing number of non–medical team projects.
Researchers can download the public CHAPO dataset, which contains the data the web tool displays and additional data fields, to conduct their own research on the motivations and impacts of these projects. Details of the database are documented in a technical manual, also available for download.
Chinese Health Assistance Projects Overseas
Country Ranking by Aid Amount
About the Data
CHAPO contains two sets of data: project-level data and country-level data.
Project-Level Data
The project-level data were imported from AidData’s Global Chinese Development Finance Dataset, Version 3.0 (GCDF), which covers China’s overseas finance data from 2000 to 2021. The tool uses the following information from GCDF: project titles, recipient countries, project descriptions, estimated budgets, and planned start and completion years. The tool includes the original, unedited content taken directly from that dataset; the only exception is the “new short title” field, which the project team added using abridged versions of the GCDF titles.
Country-Level Data
The country-level data include political regime type, which is based on the "Regimes of the World" database published by the Varieties of Democracy project; and life expectancy at birth, IHR core capacity index, and UHC service coverage index, which are from the World Health Organization Global Health Observatory.
Topics
Document Details
- Copyright: RAND Corporation
- Availability: Web-Only
- Year: 2024
- DOI: https://doi.org/10.7249/TLA3336-1
- Document Number: TL-A3336-1
Citation
RAND Style Manual
Bouey, Jennifer, Rakesh Pandey, and Agnes Xiangzhen Wang, Mapping China's Health Assistance Projects Overseas, RAND Corporation, TL-A3336-1, 2024. As of April 8, 2025: https://www.rand.org/pubs/tools/TLA3336-1.html
Chicago Manual of Style
Bouey, Jennifer, Rakesh Pandey, and Agnes Xiangzhen Wang, Mapping China's Health Assistance Projects Overseas. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2024. https://www.rand.org/pubs/tools/TLA3336-1.html.
Digital Credits
Alyson Youngblood (design), Nelson Correia (development), and Marissa Norris (production)
Research conducted by
This research was funded by The Cyrus and Michael Tang Foundation and was carried out within the RAND Global and Emerging Risks division.
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