Development aid of authoritarian states

Funding from the Volkswagen Foundation for Andreas Fuchs

The Volkswagen Foundation is funding the research project "Tapping innovative data sources to analyse the impact of authoritarian states on global development" by Prof. Dr Andreas Fuchs (Chair of Development Economics) with 918,100 euros as part of the funding initiative "Momentum - funding for first-time researchers".

The world is experiencing a period of upheaval in which authoritarian states with a different economic and development model are playing an increasingly important role in development processes in the Global South. Examples of this are the infrastructure projects of the Chinese "Belt and Road" initiative or the impact of the war in Ukraine on food security in Africa. The project will investigate research questions such as "What do these power shifts mean for sustainable development?" and "What are the consequences for Europe and the West?"

The Momentum funding is intended to broaden the professorship's previous focus, which was on analysing China's development cooperation with countries in the Global South, and to build up expertise on the aid and investment projects of other authoritarian states such as Russia and Saudi Arabia, which have so far been little investigated in economics.

One challenge is the lack of transparency of authoritarian states. In Göttingen, expertise on the use of data from non-official sources and open source intelligence is to be developed. New interfaces with political and regional sciences and the Campus Institute for Data Science are to be created.