Bradley C Parks
Biographic Data
| ID | 291344 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Bradley C Parks |
| GIVEN NAMES | Bradley C |
| FAMILY NAME | Parks |
| SIGNATURE | PARKS B C |
| AFFILIATIONS | William & Mary |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 684 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
How Does the World Bank Influence the Development Policy Priorities of Low-Income and Lower-Middle Income Countries
How does the World Bank’s use of lending and non-lending instruments affect the policy priorities of developing countries? We consider how certain forms of external assistance can shape the incentives of political leaders and the ideational environment within which they work in ways that promote reform. With new data on the delivery of analytical and advisory products and micro-level survey data from 1244 public sector officials in 121 developing…
Connective financing: Chinese infrastructure projects and the diffusion of economic activity in developing countries
This paper studies the causal effect of transport infrastructure on the spatial distribution of economic activity within subnational regions across a large number of developing countries. To do so, we introduce a new global dataset of geolocated Chinese grant- and loan-financed development projects from 2000 to 2014 and combine it with measures of spatial concentration based on remotely sensed data. We find that Chinese-financed transportation pr…
Does India Use Development Finance to Compete With China? A Subnational Analysis
China and India increasingly provide aid and credit to developing countries. This article explores whether India uses these financial instruments to compete for geopolitical and commercial influence with China. We build a new geocoded dataset of Indian government-financed projects in the Global South between 2007 and 2014 and combine it with data on Chinese government-financed projects. Our regression results for 2,333 provinces within 123 countr…
Can Aid Buy Foreign Public Support? Evidence from Chinese Development Finance
Bilateral donors use foreign aid to pursue soft power. We test the effectiveness of aid in reaching this goal by leveraging a new dataset on the precise commitment, start, and end dates of Chinese development projects. We use data from the Gallup World Poll for 126 countries over the 2006–17 period and identify causal effects by (i) an event-study model that includes high-dimensional fixed effects and (ii) instrumental variables regressions that …
When Does Transparency Improve Institutional Performance? Evidence from 20,000 Projects in 183 Countries
Access to information (ATI) policies are often praised for strengthening transparency, accountability, and trust in public institutions, yet evidence that they improve institutional performance is mixed. We argue that an important impediment to the effective operation of such policies is the failure of bureaucrats to comply with information requests that could expose poor performance. Analyzing a new data set on the performance of approximately 2…
Banking on Beijing: The Aims and Impacts of China's Overseas Development Program
China is now the lender of first resort for much of the developing world, but Beijing has fueled speculation among policymakers, scholars, and journalists by shrouding its grant-giving and lending activities in secrecy. Introducing a systematic and transparent method of tracking Chinese development projects around the world, this book explains Beijing's motives and analyzes the intended and unintended effects of its overseas investments. Whereas …
Aid, China, and Growth: Evidence from a New Global Development Finance Dataset
This article introduces a new dataset of official financing from China to 138 developing countries between 2000 and 2014. It investigates whether Chinese development finance affects economic growth in recipient countries. The results demonstrate that Chinese development finance boosts short-term economic growth. An additional project increases growth by between 0.41 and 1.49 percentage points 2 years after commitment, on average. While this study…
Is Favoritism a Threat to Chinese Aid Effectiveness? A Subnational Analysis of Chinese Development Projects
Aid Management, Trust, and Development Policy Influence: New Evidence from a Survey of Public Sector Officials in Low-Income and Middle-Income Countries
African leaders and the geography of China's foreign assistance
Natural resource sector FDI, government policy, and economic growth: Quasi-experimental evidence from Liberia
When do governments trade domestic reforms for external rewards? Explaining policy responses to the Millennium Challenge Corporation's eligibility standards
Journalistic reports and case study evidence suggest that governments have made policy and institutional reforms to achieve or maintain eligibility for assistance from the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC). However, the empirical scope of the “MCC Effect”—across countries, policy domains, and time—remains a subject of speculation and debate. There is also little rigorous evidence about the conditions under which the MCC eligibility standards…
Tracking Underreported Financial Flows: China’s Development Finance and the Aid–Conflict Nexus Revisited
China’s provision of development finance to other countries is sizable but reliable information is scarce. We introduce a new open-source methodology for collecting project-level development finance information and create a database of Chinese official finance (OF) to Africa from 2000 to 2011. We find that China’s commitments amounted to approximately US$73 billion, of which US$15 billion are comparable to Official Development Assistance followin…
Aiming at the Wrong Targets: The Domestic Consequences of International Efforts to Build Institutions
We explain why international development organizations have had so little success building and reforming public sector institutions in developing countries. They often fail despite their apparently strong commitment to achieving measurable results and extraordinary amounts of time, money, and effort. We demonstrate that, when donors and lenders make access to financing contingent upon achievement of performance targets, recipient countries tend t…
‘Ground-Truthing’ Chinese Development Finance in Africa: Field Evidence from South Africa and Uganda
A new methodology, Tracking Underreported Financial Flows (TUFF), leverages open-source information on development finance by non-transparent, non-Western donors. If such open-source methods prove to be valid and reliable, they can enhance our understanding of the causes and consequences of development finance from non-transparent donors including, but not limited to, China. But open-source methods face charges of inaccuracy. In this study we cre…
A mid-term analysis of progress toward international biodiversity targets
In 2010, the international community, under the auspices of the Convention on Biological Diversity, agreed on 20 biodiversity-related “Aichi Targets” to be achieved within a decade. We provide a comprehensive mid-term assessment of progress toward these global targets using 55 indicator data sets. We projected indicator trends to 2020 using an adaptive statistical framework that incorporated the specific properties of individual time series. On c…
In-And-Outers and Moonlighters: An Evaluation of the Impact of Policy-making Exposure on IR Scholarship
Some international relations (IR) scholars lament the divide that exists between the academic community and the policy community. Others cele-brate it. In this article, we test a core proposition advanced by advocates of bridging the policy-academy divide: that direct engagement in the policy-making process will make international relations scholars more adept at designing, undertaking, and communicating research in ways that are use-ful and rele…
When Do Environmentally Focused Assistance Projects Achieve their Objectives? Evidence from World Bank Post-Project Evaluations
Scholars and practitioners have paid considerable attention to the factors that promote successful outcomes in environmentally focused assistance projects. Previous studies have identified various potential predictors of successful outcomes, including the political commitment, institutional capacity, and governance quality of the recipient country; the severity of environmental pressures in the recipient country; donor-recipient contracting dynam…
More Dollars than Sense: Refining Our Knowledge of Development Finance Using AidData
Climate Change, Social Theory and Justice
This article seeks to answer why North-South climate negotiations have gone on for decades without producing any substantial results. To address this question, we revisit and seek to integrate insights from several disparate theories, including structuralism (new and old), world systems theory, rational choice institutionalism, and social constructivism. We argue that the lack of convergence on climate grew almost inevitably from our starkly uneq…
Ecologically Unequal Exchange, Ecological Debt, and Climate Justice: The History and Implications of Three Related Ideas for a New Social Movement
Building on structuralist perspectives of the world economy, a small but growing group of researchers have forged a new literature on `ecologically unequal exchange' and documented that energy and materials disproportionately flow from the Global South to the Global North. These findings have begun to influence efforts to negotiate a `post-Kyoto' global climate regime. Since the extraction of resources and energy is one of the most damaging stage…
Inequality and the global climate regime: Breaking the north-south impasse
This article explores the hypothesis that global inequality may be a central impediment to interstate cooperation on climate change policy. Conventional wisdom suggests that outcomes in international environmental politics are primarily attributable to material self-interest, bargaining power, coercion, domestic environmental values, exogenous shocks and crises, the existence of salient policy solutions, the strength of political leadership and t…
Fueling Injustice: Globalization, Ecologically Unequal Exchange and Climate Change
The globalization of economic production fundamentally reshapes how a ‘fair’ solution to the climate change problem must be forged. Emissions are increasing sharply in developing countries as wealthy nations ‘offshore’ the energy- and natural resource-intensive stages of production. We review a new and relatively under-utilized theory of ‘ecologically unequal exchange’ and apply it to the case of climate change. We describe four distinct principl…
A climate of injustice: Global inequality, North-South politics, and climate policy
Globalization, Vulnerability to Climate Change, and Perceived Injustice
As the earth's climate begins to shift into a hotter and less predictable period, there is a basic injustice in who will suffer worst and first. Nations facing rising oceans and drought are those least responsible for the problem, and they have the least resources to cope with them. To evaluate claims of environmental injustice, we examine three cases where the first signs of climate change are being felt worst and first: murderous flooding from …
A climate of injustice: Global inequality, North-South politics, and climate policy
More Dollars than Sense: Refining Our Knowledge of Development Finance Using AidData
African leaders and the geography of China's foreign assistance
Ecologically Unequal Exchange, Ecological Debt, and Climate Justice: The History and Implications of Three Related Ideas for a New Social Movement
Building on structuralist perspectives of the world economy, a small but growing group of researchers have forged a new literature on `ecologically unequal exchange' and documented that energy and materials disproportionately flow from the Global South to the Global North. These findings have begun to influence efforts to negotiate a `post-Kyoto' global climate regime. Since the extraction of resources and energy is one of the most damaging stage…
Tracking Underreported Financial Flows: China’s Development Finance and the Aid–Conflict Nexus Revisited
China’s provision of development finance to other countries is sizable but reliable information is scarce. We introduce a new open-source methodology for collecting project-level development finance information and create a database of Chinese official finance (OF) to Africa from 2000 to 2011. We find that China’s commitments amounted to approximately US$73 billion, of which US$15 billion are comparable to Official Development Assistance followin…
Climate Change, Social Theory and Justice
This article seeks to answer why North-South climate negotiations have gone on for decades without producing any substantial results. To address this question, we revisit and seek to integrate insights from several disparate theories, including structuralism (new and old), world systems theory, rational choice institutionalism, and social constructivism. We argue that the lack of convergence on climate grew almost inevitably from our starkly uneq…
Fueling Injustice: Globalization, Ecologically Unequal Exchange and Climate Change
The globalization of economic production fundamentally reshapes how a ‘fair’ solution to the climate change problem must be forged. Emissions are increasing sharply in developing countries as wealthy nations ‘offshore’ the energy- and natural resource-intensive stages of production. We review a new and relatively under-utilized theory of ‘ecologically unequal exchange’ and apply it to the case of climate change. We describe four distinct principl…
Globalization, Vulnerability to Climate Change, and Perceived Injustice
As the earth's climate begins to shift into a hotter and less predictable period, there is a basic injustice in who will suffer worst and first. Nations facing rising oceans and drought are those least responsible for the problem, and they have the least resources to cope with them. To evaluate claims of environmental injustice, we examine three cases where the first signs of climate change are being felt worst and first: murderous flooding from …
Aiming at the Wrong Targets: The Domestic Consequences of International Efforts to Build Institutions
We explain why international development organizations have had so little success building and reforming public sector institutions in developing countries. They often fail despite their apparently strong commitment to achieving measurable results and extraordinary amounts of time, money, and effort. We demonstrate that, when donors and lenders make access to financing contingent upon achievement of performance targets, recipient countries tend t…
When Does Transparency Improve Institutional Performance? Evidence from 20,000 Projects in 183 Countries
Access to information (ATI) policies are often praised for strengthening transparency, accountability, and trust in public institutions, yet evidence that they improve institutional performance is mixed. We argue that an important impediment to the effective operation of such policies is the failure of bureaucrats to comply with information requests that could expose poor performance. Analyzing a new data set on the performance of approximately 2…
Natural resource sector FDI, government policy, and economic growth: Quasi-experimental evidence from Liberia
Inequality and the global climate regime: Breaking the north-south impasse
This article explores the hypothesis that global inequality may be a central impediment to interstate cooperation on climate change policy. Conventional wisdom suggests that outcomes in international environmental politics are primarily attributable to material self-interest, bargaining power, coercion, domestic environmental values, exogenous shocks and crises, the existence of salient policy solutions, the strength of political leadership and t…
Is Favoritism a Threat to Chinese Aid Effectiveness? A Subnational Analysis of Chinese Development Projects
Can Aid Buy Foreign Public Support? Evidence from Chinese Development Finance
Bilateral donors use foreign aid to pursue soft power. We test the effectiveness of aid in reaching this goal by leveraging a new dataset on the precise commitment, start, and end dates of Chinese development projects. We use data from the Gallup World Poll for 126 countries over the 2006–17 period and identify causal effects by (i) an event-study model that includes high-dimensional fixed effects and (ii) instrumental variables regressions that …
When Do Environmentally Focused Assistance Projects Achieve their Objectives? Evidence from World Bank Post-Project Evaluations
Scholars and practitioners have paid considerable attention to the factors that promote successful outcomes in environmentally focused assistance projects. Previous studies have identified various potential predictors of successful outcomes, including the political commitment, institutional capacity, and governance quality of the recipient country; the severity of environmental pressures in the recipient country; donor-recipient contracting dynam…
Connective financing: Chinese infrastructure projects and the diffusion of economic activity in developing countries
This paper studies the causal effect of transport infrastructure on the spatial distribution of economic activity within subnational regions across a large number of developing countries. To do so, we introduce a new global dataset of geolocated Chinese grant- and loan-financed development projects from 2000 to 2014 and combine it with measures of spatial concentration based on remotely sensed data. We find that Chinese-financed transportation pr…
In-And-Outers and Moonlighters: An Evaluation of the Impact of Policy-making Exposure on IR Scholarship
Some international relations (IR) scholars lament the divide that exists between the academic community and the policy community. Others cele-brate it. In this article, we test a core proposition advanced by advocates of bridging the policy-academy divide: that direct engagement in the policy-making process will make international relations scholars more adept at designing, undertaking, and communicating research in ways that are use-ful and rele…
Does India Use Development Finance to Compete With China? A Subnational Analysis
China and India increasingly provide aid and credit to developing countries. This article explores whether India uses these financial instruments to compete for geopolitical and commercial influence with China. We build a new geocoded dataset of Indian government-financed projects in the Global South between 2007 and 2014 and combine it with data on Chinese government-financed projects. Our regression results for 2,333 provinces within 123 countr…
Aid Management, Trust, and Development Policy Influence: New Evidence from a Survey of Public Sector Officials in Low-Income and Middle-Income Countries
When do governments trade domestic reforms for external rewards? Explaining policy responses to the Millennium Challenge Corporation's eligibility standards
Journalistic reports and case study evidence suggest that governments have made policy and institutional reforms to achieve or maintain eligibility for assistance from the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC). However, the empirical scope of the “MCC Effect”—across countries, policy domains, and time—remains a subject of speculation and debate. There is also little rigorous evidence about the conditions under which the MCC eligibility standards…
Globalization, Vulnerability to Climate Change, and Perceived Injustice
As the earth's climate begins to shift into a hotter and less predictable period, there is a basic injustice in who will suffer worst and first. Nations facing rising oceans and drought are those least responsible for the problem, and they have the least resources to cope with them. To evaluate claims of environmental injustice, we examine three cases where the first signs of climate change are being felt worst and first: murderous flooding from …
Fueling Injustice: Globalization, Ecologically Unequal Exchange and Climate Change
The globalization of economic production fundamentally reshapes how a ‘fair’ solution to the climate change problem must be forged. Emissions are increasing sharply in developing countries as wealthy nations ‘offshore’ the energy- and natural resource-intensive stages of production. We review a new and relatively under-utilized theory of ‘ecologically unequal exchange’ and apply it to the case of climate change. We describe four distinct principl…
A climate of injustice: Global inequality, North-South politics, and climate policy
Inequality and the global climate regime: Breaking the north-south impasse
This article explores the hypothesis that global inequality may be a central impediment to interstate cooperation on climate change policy. Conventional wisdom suggests that outcomes in international environmental politics are primarily attributable to material self-interest, bargaining power, coercion, domestic environmental values, exogenous shocks and crises, the existence of salient policy solutions, the strength of political leadership and t…
Ecologically Unequal Exchange, Ecological Debt, and Climate Justice: The History and Implications of Three Related Ideas for a New Social Movement
Building on structuralist perspectives of the world economy, a small but growing group of researchers have forged a new literature on `ecologically unequal exchange' and documented that energy and materials disproportionately flow from the Global South to the Global North. These findings have begun to influence efforts to negotiate a `post-Kyoto' global climate regime. Since the extraction of resources and energy is one of the most damaging stage…
Climate Change, Social Theory and Justice
This article seeks to answer why North-South climate negotiations have gone on for decades without producing any substantial results. To address this question, we revisit and seek to integrate insights from several disparate theories, including structuralism (new and old), world systems theory, rational choice institutionalism, and social constructivism. We argue that the lack of convergence on climate grew almost inevitably from our starkly uneq…
More Dollars than Sense: Refining Our Knowledge of Development Finance Using AidData
In-And-Outers and Moonlighters: An Evaluation of the Impact of Policy-making Exposure on IR Scholarship
Some international relations (IR) scholars lament the divide that exists between the academic community and the policy community. Others cele-brate it. In this article, we test a core proposition advanced by advocates of bridging the policy-academy divide: that direct engagement in the policy-making process will make international relations scholars more adept at designing, undertaking, and communicating research in ways that are use-ful and rele…
When Do Environmentally Focused Assistance Projects Achieve their Objectives? Evidence from World Bank Post-Project Evaluations
Scholars and practitioners have paid considerable attention to the factors that promote successful outcomes in environmentally focused assistance projects. Previous studies have identified various potential predictors of successful outcomes, including the political commitment, institutional capacity, and governance quality of the recipient country; the severity of environmental pressures in the recipient country; donor-recipient contracting dynam…
A mid-term analysis of progress toward international biodiversity targets
In 2010, the international community, under the auspices of the Convention on Biological Diversity, agreed on 20 biodiversity-related “Aichi Targets” to be achieved within a decade. We provide a comprehensive mid-term assessment of progress toward these global targets using 55 indicator data sets. We projected indicator trends to 2020 using an adaptive statistical framework that incorporated the specific properties of individual time series. On c…
‘Ground-Truthing’ Chinese Development Finance in Africa: Field Evidence from South Africa and Uganda
A new methodology, Tracking Underreported Financial Flows (TUFF), leverages open-source information on development finance by non-transparent, non-Western donors. If such open-source methods prove to be valid and reliable, they can enhance our understanding of the causes and consequences of development finance from non-transparent donors including, but not limited to, China. But open-source methods face charges of inaccuracy. In this study we cre…
Tracking Underreported Financial Flows: China’s Development Finance and the Aid–Conflict Nexus Revisited
China’s provision of development finance to other countries is sizable but reliable information is scarce. We introduce a new open-source methodology for collecting project-level development finance information and create a database of Chinese official finance (OF) to Africa from 2000 to 2011. We find that China’s commitments amounted to approximately US$73 billion, of which US$15 billion are comparable to Official Development Assistance followin…
Aiming at the Wrong Targets: The Domestic Consequences of International Efforts to Build Institutions
We explain why international development organizations have had so little success building and reforming public sector institutions in developing countries. They often fail despite their apparently strong commitment to achieving measurable results and extraordinary amounts of time, money, and effort. We demonstrate that, when donors and lenders make access to financing contingent upon achievement of performance targets, recipient countries tend t…
Natural resource sector FDI, government policy, and economic growth: Quasi-experimental evidence from Liberia
When do governments trade domestic reforms for external rewards? Explaining policy responses to the Millennium Challenge Corporation's eligibility standards
Journalistic reports and case study evidence suggest that governments have made policy and institutional reforms to achieve or maintain eligibility for assistance from the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC). However, the empirical scope of the “MCC Effect”—across countries, policy domains, and time—remains a subject of speculation and debate. There is also little rigorous evidence about the conditions under which the MCC eligibility standards…
African leaders and the geography of China's foreign assistance
Aid, China, and Growth: Evidence from a New Global Development Finance Dataset
This article introduces a new dataset of official financing from China to 138 developing countries between 2000 and 2014. It investigates whether Chinese development finance affects economic growth in recipient countries. The results demonstrate that Chinese development finance boosts short-term economic growth. An additional project increases growth by between 0.41 and 1.49 percentage points 2 years after commitment, on average. While this study…
Is Favoritism a Threat to Chinese Aid Effectiveness? A Subnational Analysis of Chinese Development Projects
Aid Management, Trust, and Development Policy Influence: New Evidence from a Survey of Public Sector Officials in Low-Income and Middle-Income Countries
Banking on Beijing: The Aims and Impacts of China's Overseas Development Program
China is now the lender of first resort for much of the developing world, but Beijing has fueled speculation among policymakers, scholars, and journalists by shrouding its grant-giving and lending activities in secrecy. Introducing a systematic and transparent method of tracking Chinese development projects around the world, this book explains Beijing's motives and analyzes the intended and unintended effects of its overseas investments. Whereas …
When Does Transparency Improve Institutional Performance? Evidence from 20,000 Projects in 183 Countries
Access to information (ATI) policies are often praised for strengthening transparency, accountability, and trust in public institutions, yet evidence that they improve institutional performance is mixed. We argue that an important impediment to the effective operation of such policies is the failure of bureaucrats to comply with information requests that could expose poor performance. Analyzing a new data set on the performance of approximately 2…
How Does the World Bank Influence the Development Policy Priorities of Low-Income and Lower-Middle Income Countries
How does the World Bank’s use of lending and non-lending instruments affect the policy priorities of developing countries? We consider how certain forms of external assistance can shape the incentives of political leaders and the ideational environment within which they work in ways that promote reform. With new data on the delivery of analytical and advisory products and micro-level survey data from 1244 public sector officials in 121 developing…
Connective financing: Chinese infrastructure projects and the diffusion of economic activity in developing countries
This paper studies the causal effect of transport infrastructure on the spatial distribution of economic activity within subnational regions across a large number of developing countries. To do so, we introduce a new global dataset of geolocated Chinese grant- and loan-financed development projects from 2000 to 2014 and combine it with measures of spatial concentration based on remotely sensed data. We find that Chinese-financed transportation pr…
Does India Use Development Finance to Compete With China? A Subnational Analysis
China and India increasingly provide aid and credit to developing countries. This article explores whether India uses these financial instruments to compete for geopolitical and commercial influence with China. We build a new geocoded dataset of Indian government-financed projects in the Global South between 2007 and 2014 and combine it with data on Chinese government-financed projects. Our regression results for 2,333 provinces within 123 countr…
Can Aid Buy Foreign Public Support? Evidence from Chinese Development Finance
Bilateral donors use foreign aid to pursue soft power. We test the effectiveness of aid in reaching this goal by leveraging a new dataset on the precise commitment, start, and end dates of Chinese development projects. We use data from the Gallup World Poll for 126 countries over the 2006–17 period and identify causal effects by (i) an event-study model that includes high-dimensional fixed effects and (ii) instrumental variables regressions that …
Economics (22 works) · International Development and Aid (20 works) · Political science (18 works) · Business (15 works) · Economic growth (10 works) · Finance (9 works) · Politics (9 works) · Developing country (8 works) · Poverty, Education, and Child Welfare (8 works) · China (7 works)