Chinese Development Finance and MDG Gap Dynamics: Evidence from Child Mortality and Poverty

This paper examines whether Chinese development finance is associated with faster progress toward Millennium Development Goal style targets in low- and middle-income countries. We combine AidData’s Chinese Official Finance to the Global South data with World Bank indicators and study progress through the lens of MDG gaps differences between observed outcomes and a target level. We model these gaps as dynamic processes, allowing Chinese finance to shift the trajectory while accounting for strong persistence over time. The results show that under five mortality gaps follow highly persistent AR(1) dynamics consistent with a constant proportional closing of the remaining distance to the target an empirical analogue to Zeno’s paradox in which progress continues but reaching zero is slow and asymptotic. At the same time, improvements in average gaps do not translate into broad cross-country convergence. The distribution of gaps retains high Shannon entropy, indicating that dispersion remains substantial even as mean outcomes improve. Overall, the findings suggest that MDG progress is governed by a sticky law of motion in which external finance may affect levels or rates at the margin, but global development outcomes can improve without the system collapsing into a low entropy configuration where most countries cluster near the target.