Foreign Borrowing, Sovereignty, and Public Opinion in the Global South: Traditional Lenders or China?

Foreign debt is a salient political issue across the Global South, sparking protests and political action. Do widespread and longstanding critiques of traditional multilateral lenders such as the IMF and the World Bank imply that China’s rise as a lender is welcomed by publics in the Global South? Or does dissatisfaction with Chinese lending practices lead to preferences for traditional multilateral lenders? We propose that the public is particularly sensitive to the sovereignty implications of foreign debt. Therefore, loans and lenders perceived as more likely to infringe on sovereignty will be less attractive to Global South publics. We test these contentions through a preregistered, population representative survey experiment (n=8,762) in nine middle-income democracies across three regions: South America, Southeast Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa. We find that publics in these nine countries are highly engaged in the issue of debt and concerned about the implications of debt for both sovereignty and the local economy. As a result, the public tends to prefer the traditional multilateral lenders, the IMF and World Bank, as well as private lenders. The public is less favorable towards US lending, but even less so towards that of China. As the first multi-country study of public opinion of debt and its intrinsic sovereignty concerns in middle-income democracies, this research provides lessons for international financial institutions as well as insights regarding the durability of the liberal international order.

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