China's economic assistance to Africa has been the focus of considerable attention in the last couple of years, but there is still much confusion about the sums involved and how the Chinese system operates in practice. Brautigam separates the realities from the myths about these subjects, and evaluates the implications for the EU and the United States of issues such as ‘aid-for-resources'; assistance to ‘rogue' regimes; debt-sustainability and new Chinese lending; environmental and social standards; and tied aid.

Deborah Brautigam is Associate Professor at American University's School of International Service in Washington, D.C.  She has also held faculty appointments at Columbia University in New York and has been a visiting fellow at the University of Mauritius, the University of Liberia, Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone, and the Chr. Michelsen Institute in Bergen, Norway.  She is the author of Chinese Aid and African Development (St. Martin's Press, 1998), and Aid Dependence and Governance (Almqvist & Wiksell, 2000); co-editor of Capacity and Consent:  Taxation and State-Building in Developing Countries (Cambridge University Press, 2008); and author of a number of articles and book chapters on foreign aid, the political economy of development, China and Africa, and the politics of economic policy.  Professor Brautigam holds a Ph.D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and has been a recipient of a Fulbright Senior Regional Research Award for Africa, and a Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Grant, and has been awarded fellowships from the Council on Foreign Relations and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. 

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