Two Paths: Why States Join or Avoid China’s Belt and Road Initiative
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ksad049.pdf
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898.31 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
500ce553cd201de9a7d3765711252034
Author(s)
Atkins, Eleanor
Fravel, M Taylor
Wang, Raymond
Ackert, Nick
Huang, Sihao
Date Issued
July 2023
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Citation
Eleanor Atkins, M Taylor Fravel, Raymond Wang, Nick Ackert, Sihao Huang, Two Paths: Why States Join or Avoid China’s Belt and Road Initiative, Global Studies Quarterly, Volume 3, Issue 3, July 2023, ksad049.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Although China’s motives for developing the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) have been well studied, scholars have yet to comprehensively examine why states seek to join the initiative. We fill this gap by examining how and why states join the BRI. Countries join by signing a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with China on cooperation under the BRI framework. These MOUs create few or no obligations for the states who sign them but increase the possibility of reaping future economic benefits. Thus, we argue that most states should join the BRI unless they view the costs of participation as higher. We hypothesize, and find support for, the argument that democracies are less likely to join because they view participating in a Chinese-led initiative as more costly than non-democracies. Our statistical analysis using a new dataset of BRI participants and paired case studies provides quantitative and qualitative support for this argument.
Subjects
General Medicine
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Political Science
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1093/isagsq/ksad049
