China Overseas Finance Inventory Database – Technical Note

China’s leadership is increasingly aware of the importance of environmental sustainability as a key factor in the success of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), an initiative first raised publicly by Chinese leader Xi Jinping in 2013 for intercontinental development and economic cooperation. The BRI puts transportation and energy infrastructure among its top priority areas, emphasizing the consideration of environmental and climate change impacts in infrastructure development. The China Overseas Finance Inventory (COFI) Database is a project to leverage existing public and commercial data sources and methodologies to build a comprehensive database on China’s outward investment in the infrastructure sector.

A collaboration between the Boston University Global Development Policy Center, the Inter-American Dialogue, the China-Africa Research Initiative at the Johns Hopkins University and the World Resources Institute, the COFI Database and its accompanying technical note review power-generation projects in BRI countries financed by Chinese corporations and banks that reached financial closure from 2000-2020. The dataset captures 430 power plants in 76 BRI countries, including 220 equity investment transactions and 253 debt investment transactions made by Chinese investors.

The technical note explains how the COFI Database is consolidated using nine source databases, with both automated join method in R Studio and manual joining by analysts. The researchers also explain how they addressed the challenge of matching power plants and their investments across publicly available and commercial databases and why they provided the final database as an open data source. Though the original nine databases cover different categories, the COFI Database tracks financial transactions and technical characteristics. The technical note also reveals information about the results, data usage and future data management.

Various types of research can be conducted based on or inspired by the COFI Database. Analysis of Chinese overseas coal reserves and debt stress would help inform investors about how to manage their coal stranded assets risks. Trend analysis in oil and gas investment, as well as renewables in different countries, would be valuable to identify needs and gaps in the energy development pathways in BRI countries. The database can also encourage transparency of data across BRI countries.