China Overseas Finance Inventory Database
This technical note explains the process of building the China Overseas Finance Inventory (COFI) Database, a comprehensive database covering both Chinese equity and debt foreign investments in the power-generation sector in Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) countries. The note explains how the authors addressed the challenge of matching power plants and their investments across publicly available and commercial databases and how they provided the final database as an open data source.
The China Overseas Finance Inventory (COFI) is a comprehensive database covering Chinese equity and debt investments in the power-generation sector across 87 Belt and Road Initiative countries. It consolidates nine different source databases to include the transaction details of 655 investments in 575 power plants. The database is a collaboration between the Boston University Global Development Policy Center, the Inter-American Dialogue, the China-Africa Research Initiative at Johns Hopkins University and World Resources Institute.
Key data points for financial transactions in COFI include the financial instrument (equity or debt), investor name, amount and financial close year. Key technical characteristics tracked for projects in COFI include name, installed capacity, commissioning year, country and primary fuel type.
The database is available for download through Open Data Portal.
Projects
Belt and Road
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