Africa’s resource exports to China: is there an institutional race to the bottom?

African countries started to channel an increasing portion of their resource exports to China since early 2000s, with widespread speculation that this could lead to an institutional ‘race to the bottom’. We empirically investigate the impact of this rising share of resource exports to China on democratization and corruption in 45 African countries between 1990 and 2017. We find a statistically significant positive effect of resource exports to China on participatory democracy and control of corruption. As political transitions could be activated by transitory economic shocks, we utilize a two-stage least square approach to test whether improvements in institutions result from rising national income as a result of resource-export windfalls. We find empirical support of a resource-income channel for the case of improvements in corruption control. In short, our empirical analysis indicates that rising resource trading with China is reconcilable with improvements in institutional quality for African countries.