Category: Debt Trap

There is a lot of confusion in some parts of the world, including Africa, as to what role the United States wants to play in the current international order. On the one hand, institutions like the State Department, Pentagon, and USAID maintain that Washington ...

Africa's rising indebtedness to China is prompting concern across the continent that governments need to do a better job negotiating infrastructure financing deals. Too often, critics contend, the Chinese are simply out-maneuvering their African counterparts in the negotiating process. This is the core of ...

The issue of whether African countries are taking on too much Chinese debt is often positioned in the West as some kind of choice as if Africa policymakers prefer to take loans from the Chinese rather than Western governments or international organizations like the ...

For the past year or so, senior U.S. government officials been accusing China of engaging in so-called “debtbook” diplomacy, a tactic that Washington contends intentionally burdens developing countries with billions of dollars of loans. When these countries, many of them some of ...

There is a certain irony when a U.S. envoy travels to Africa to warn his hosts about the dangers of borrowing money from China. The United States, after all, is the world’s most indebted country and borrows more from China ...