No Hyena Eats the Lion’s Share

Chapter 3 finds that regional favoritism in the subnational allocation of development finance was relatively limited under Ethiopia’s Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) regime (1991–2019). This restraint stemmed from low political competition, which reduced electoral pressures, and from the EPRDF’s ethnic federalism, which ensured ethnolinguistic representation at the leadership level and proportional allocation based on population and tax revenue. The Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF)-led government centralized rents to pursue national development goals, channeling both Chinese and traditional finance into state-led plans regardless of financier conditionalities. This combination of weak political competition, strong state capacity, and centralized rent management helped suppress regional bias. However, the regime’s centralized structure also bred fragility – marked by repressed dissent, a lack of institutionalized succession, and rising ethnic tensions – which ultimately contributed to the EPRDF’s collapse and the outbreak of civil war in 2020.