In 2013, President Xi Jinping proposed that China would create a “Silk
Road Economic Belt” across Central Asia and Europe and a “21st Century
Maritime Silk Road” running through the South China Sea and the Indian
Ocean, on to the Middle East and Europe — programs meant to revive
ancient trade routes and reinforce existing ones. Beijing quickly wove
these two visions together and dubbed them the Belt and Road Initiative
(BRI).To get more
belt and road, you can visit shine news official website.
While seemingly aimed at regional economic corridors, the BRI is in fact
global and motivated by economic and strategic interests. A successful
BRI would allow China to more efficiently utilize excess savings and
construction capacity, expand trade, consolidate economic and diplomatic
relations with participating countries, and diversify China’s import of
energy and other resources through economic corridors that circumvent
routes that are controlled by the U.S. and its allies.
The initiative is generally popular in the developing world, where
almost all countries face infrastructure deficiencies and a shortage of
resources to overcome them. Through large amounts of loans to
participating countries to construct infrastructure in various sectors,
the BRI can potentially bring significant benefits to these countries by
filling their infrastructure gaps and boosting economic growth.
While popular with developing countries, the initiative has received
various criticisms from advanced industrial economies: that the program
lacks transparency and serves to facilitate China’s export of its
authoritarian model; that the commercial loan terms are bringing on a
new round of debt crises in the developing world; and that the projects
have inadequate environmental and social safeguards.
This paper examines the implementation of BRI infrastructure projects in
Africa in light of available information and concludes that African
experiences with the BRI are quite heterogeneous. Some of the major
borrowers have debt sustainability problems, while others have
integrated the loans from China into sound overall macroeconomic
programs. Some of the major borrowers are authoritarian countries with
poor records of human rights, but other major participants are among the
more democratic countries of Africa. It is hard to make simple
generalizations about BRI in Africa. For this reason, it would be wise
for Western countries to tone down their rhetoric on BRI, as many of the
projects will probably work out well. It would help if Western
countries provided more support to the International Monetary Fund to
help countries manage their borrowing and to the World Bank to provide
more infrastructure financing that increased options for the developing
countries of Africa.
The Wall