Impacts Of The Belt And Road Initiative On The Economic Growth Of Countries Along The Routes

This dissertation investigates the impacts of the Belt and Road Initiative(B&R)on the economic growth for involved countries.The dissertation firstly reviews the existed literature about the contexts and effects of the B&R,and then summarizes and illustrates the theories of economic growth and economic integration.On the basis of literature review and theory interpretation,this dissertation turns to examine the growth effects of the B&R on local economies from three perspectives: quantitative growth,quality of growth,and inclusive growth.In particular,this dissertation firstly examines the quantitative growth effects of the B&R on local economies.From 2014 to 2019,more than 120 countries successively participated in the B&R,which intensified the regional integration and interdependence of B&R countries.Employing a difference-in-differences estimation methodology that exploits the cross-country,cross-time variation in the B&R participation,this dissertation finds that the B&R materially led to an increase of 4.5 percent in the per capita income of local economies,with particularly strong effects for lower-income countries.Discussing the potential channels,this dissertation also provides suggestive evidence that the growth effects can be interpreted in terms of foreign trade and foreign direct investment inwards.Thus,given that the trade and FDI are two important channels that promoting the local economic growth,this dissertation secondly tests the impacts of trade and FDI on the quality of economic growth for B&R countries.This dissertation uses principal component analysis to measure the total quality of economic growth and three-dimensional indicators of quality,that is,efficiency,stability and sustainability of economic growth of countries along the routes.By adopting both fixed effects model and system GMM model,this dissertation analyzes the impacts of trade and FDI on the quality growth of B&R countries.The study finds that the quality of economic growth in B&R countries generally shows an upward time trend.Trade and FDI have significantly led to an increase in the quality of economic growth in the countries involved in the B&R,which was mainly caused by the positive impacts on the growth efficiency and growth sustainability.Moreover,the Belt and Road Initiative amplified the effect of the trade mechanism on the quality of growth,but had no significantly positive effects in promoting the FDI channel.Thirdly,this dissertation analyzes the impact of B&R on the income inequality by using synthetic control methods and identifying eight B&R countries with comparing the postparticipation Gini coefficients of “treated” countries with a convex combination of similar but“untreated” countries,while accounting for the time-varying impact of unobservable heterogeneity.This research finds negative impacts of the B&R on the Gini coefficients in eight countries,with six cases significant at the conventional level.Gini coefficients significantly decrease by 0.6～3.8 percent after B&R participation,revealing that the B&R has a positive impact on the inclusive growth in these countries.In the end,this dissertation concludes that the Belt and Road Initiative is a win-win cooperative endeavor in pursuit of common development and common prosperity.