DAKAR (Mar 31): The terms of China’s loan deals with developing countries are unusually secretive and require borrowers to prioritise repayment of Chinese state-owned banks ahead of other creditors, a study of a cache of such contracts showed on Wednesday.

The dataset - compiled over three years by AidData, a U.S. research lab at the College of William & Mary - comprises 100 Chinese loan contracts with 24 low- and middle-income countries, a number of which are struggling under mounting debt burdens amid the economic fallout from the COVID-10 pandemic.