Where Chinese Finance Lands, and What It Leaves in Reported Regional Output

Abstract Chinese official finance is large and poorly captured by conventional statistics, yet little is known about where it lands inside recipient countries or whether it leaves a trace in the output that regional accounts report. This paper links geocoded project records to a harmonised panel of reported gross regional product covering 1,103 first-level administrative regions in 48 countries from 2000 to 2019. Within countries, first projects reach richer and, above all, more populous regions, the tilt is stronger for non-concessional than for concessional finance, and recent growth has no predictive power. Staggered difference-in-differences estimates against same-country, not-yet-treated regions show no detectable effect of the first project on reported output per capita. The baseline point estimate is slightly negative but disappears under matched controls, and confidence intervals exclude gains beyond a few percent across specifications. Project size, sector, financing terms and governance quality yield no reliable heterogeneity, and a decline among recent cohorts proves fragile. The evidence suggests that Chinese finance follows economic weight rather than need and that its local returns, if present, are small or are not recorded in regional accounts, which bears on how governance and measurement shape the evaluation of external finance. JEL Classification: F35 , O18 , R11 , H54 , O47