Macroscope | Belt and road: West should work with China to build infrastructure – not against it
- After 10 years of the Belt and Road Initiative, the West seems to be finally getting its act together in finding financing for its infrastructure
- But it would be a pity if the largesse was used to compete with China, when the global scale of the challenge calls for cooperation
This is not the popular view, I know, but as someone long interested in infrastructure (my first editorial on the subject was published in 1966), I have respect for China’s initiative, despite its initial shortcomings.
Building physical infrastructure, whether in the form of highways, railways, ports or power systems, is a very costly undertaking, especially when it crosses borders. Governments and private investors shy away from it.
This was the situation in 1994 when I acted as chief external editor of the World Bank’s World Development Report on infrastructure, when the Washington Consensus strongly favoured private, not state, initiatives.
Then along came Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013, proposing a remarkably bold venture for a hemisphere-spanning network of highways, sea lines and ports. It was breathtakingly imaginative.
