A Necessary Microscope: Evaluating the Localized Impact of Chinese Statecraft in the Caribbean

Abstract

The primary research question driving this analysis is whether macro-level findings established in the global aggregate survive when applied to a region, like the Caribbean, with fundamentally different structural conditions. Specifically, this thesis hypothesizes that the ever-present gravity of US influence in the Caribbean moderates the impacts of Chinese economic statecraft, causing the global consensus on Chinese leverage to either fail or significantly alter. To test this, the analysis replicates four existing studies on the impact of Chinese influence, reanalyzing their regression results with a dataset localized to the Caribbean. The empirical findings of this replication exercise validate this regional divergence, revealing a landscape where the global assumptions either completely reverse direction or are heavily amplified by US proximity. Ultimately, this implies that researchers and policymakers cannot rely on global averages to understand how Chinese aid impacts regions so geographically and historically tied to the United States.