African and Chinese leaders embraced infrastructure development and improvement as Africa’s go-to development formula in the early 2000s. However, the infrastructure initiative has not yielded the expected economic returns. This article investigates why these investments have not yet put African states on a sustainable economic growth trajectory. We argue that structural and institutional, gestational, and governance-related factors better explain the underwhelming economic performance of Chinese-funded projects in Africa than a deliberately and centrally orchestrated debt-trap strategy.
Heto et al. (Thu,) studied this question.