China’s Official Development Assistance: An Implication of the Transport Infrastructure Development in Cambodia

Abstract

China’s ODA in Cambodia had been executed since the 1950s with the remarkable evidence of the four factories’ construction in Cambodia during the 1960s, while the United States of America had also experienced providing funds to build roads and bridges and other humanitarian reliefs in Cambodia during the 1950s and 1960s. After the national election in 1993, foreign assistance was given to Cambodia to support the economic infrastructure and to fill the gap of government expenditure budgets of each year, since there was a huge amount of the trade balance deficit. China has been the largest donor and investor in Cambodia in exchange for high commitment of the country to support the “One-China Policy” and the Belt and Road initiative right after its commencement in 2013. Since then, Cambodia has received huge amounts of ODA from China in several sectors, especially the transportation infrastructure sector. This research focuses mainly on China’s ODA for transportation infrastructure development contributed to the GDP growth of Cambodia by focusing mainly on the public sector foreign aid and ignoring the private sectors (investment scheme). The researcher used a mixed-method to analyze the data collected by using Eviews 10 with the least-squares’ method to analyze the data. The research result showed that China’s ODA for the transportation infrastructure development in Cambodia significantly contributed to the GDP growth of Cambodia, with the scientific evident chance of occurrence of 99.81 percent, with only a 0.19 percent-chance of error.