Are African leaders misusing Chinese development finance? The price of country ownership

In a 2012 blog post, MIT’s Daron Acemoglu and Harvard’s James Robinson call attention to a “fancy school” built in a small village in Sierra Leone and financed by Chinese development aid. They ask a pointed question: “Why would anyone want to build a wonderful school in the middle of what Africans call ‘the bush’?” As Acemoglu and Robinson explain, “Yoni is the home village of Sierra Leone’s president, Ernest Bai Koroma.”