Dr. Tobias Broich submitted his dissertation “New Actors in the Global Economy: The Case of Chinese Development Finance in Africa” in 2017. His research fields are development economics, political economy, institutional economics, and African history at the United Nations University (UNU- MERIT) and its School of Governance in Maastricht in the Netherlands. His research is based on applied econometric analysis and analytical country narratives. During his PhD Tobias conducted fieldwork in Ethiopia where he interviewed Ethiopian government officials, staff from international aid agencies, and NGOs on the role of development finance and international cooperation on poverty reduction. Tobias is a referee for the Journal of African Development and the Social Science Quarterly.

Alexandra Zeitz’s research examines how African governments’ access to Chinese financing has changed their relationship with long-time traditional donors, including the World Bank. Drawing on fieldwork in Ethiopia, Ghana and Kenya, she examines both the strategies adopted by African governments to triangulate among their different lenders and the responses of traditional donors to a more crowded development landscape. Alexandra Zeitz is a DPhil candidate in the Department of Politics and International Relations. She holds an MPhil in International Relations from Oxford, has worked as a consultant for the United Nations Development Programme and as a researcher at the Icelandic Mission to the United Nations. She also holds a B.A. (Hons) in Politics, Psychology and Sociology from the University of Cambridge.