- “The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a global development strategy adopted by the Chinese government in 2013 involving infrastructure development and investments in 152 countries and international organizations in Asia, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas”
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Five articles about the Belt and Road Initiative, earlier known as the One Belt One Road Initiative. We begin with the Wikipedia article.
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.. - “The Belt and Road Initiative includes includes 1/3 of world trade and GDP and over 60% of the world’s population.”
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That excerpt is just the caption to the first chart in this write-up from the WB, but it is the one that really opens ones eyes to how large the BRI is.
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.. - ““There are some extreme cases where China lends into very high risk environments, and it would seem that the motivation is something different. In these situations the leverage China has as lender is used for purposes unrelated to the original loan,” said Scott Morris, one of the authors of the Washington Centre for Global Development report.”
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The Guardian in a write-up about the same topic.
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.. - “But the Crusades, as well as advances by the Mongols in Central Asia, dampened trade, and today Central Asian countries are economically isolated from each other, with intra-regional trade making up just 6.2 percent of all cross-border commerce. They are also heavily dependent on Russia, particularly for remittances—they make up one-third of the gross domestic product (GDP) of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. By 2018, remittances had dipped from their 2013 highs due to Russia’s economic woes.”
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The Council of Foreign Relations with their take.
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.. - “Throughout the text, Maçães prefers to use the term ‘Belt and Road’ over the more succinct — and increasingly popular — ‘BRI’. This has the effect of giving credibility to the author’s speculation that eventually, Belt and Road terminology will be used much like ‘the West’ is to refer to the contemporary order. This musing reveals Maçães’s central argument: that the Belt and Road has the capacity to blaze a path to an alternative world order that reflects new universal values. At some points in the text, this comes across as a utopian promise; at other points, an improbable claim. These perspectives are compared and contrasted over the course of five chapters.”
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Read this review, but more importantly, read the book! A review of the book that Bruno Macaes has written on BRI.