Silk Road (Infrastructure)
Introduction
The Belt and Road Initiative (IFR) (English: Belt and Road Initiative, BRI; Chinese: central to the foreign policy of Xi Jinping's government.[4] The BRI proposes a new concept for international relations based on the idea of "negotiating, building and sharing together", based on free trade between nations, in order to create an order based on prosperity and stability, taking as a model the relations established between East and West in the era of the historic Silk Road.[5][6].
Xi initially announced the strategy as the "Silk Road Economic Belt" during an official visit to Kazakhstan in September 2013.[7][8] The "Belt" refers to proposed land routes for road and rail transportation across landlocked Central Asia along the famous historical trade routes of the Western Regions; while "route" refers to the Indo-Pacific sea routes through Southeast Asia to South Asia, the Middle East and Africa.[9] Infrastructure investment proposals under the Belt and Road Initiative include ports, skyscrapers, railways, roads, bridges, airports, dams, thermal power plants and railway tunnels.
The initiative was incorporated into China's Constitution in 2017.[4] The Chinese government calls the initiative "an attempt to improve regional connectivity and embrace a brighter future."[10] The project has a completion date of 2049,[11] which will coincide with the centenary of the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC). A 2019 study by global economic consultants forecast that the BRI was likely to boost global GDP by $7.1 trillion per year by 2040.[12].
Economic objectives
Contenido
Los objetivos declarados son "construir un gran mercado unificado y hacer un uso completo de los mercados nacionales e internacionales, a través del intercambio cultural y la integración, para mejorar el entendimiento mutuo y la confianza de los estados miembros, lo que resulta en un patrón innovador de entradas de capital, reservas de talento y bases de datos de tecnología".[13].
La iniciativa aborda una "brecha de infraestructura" y, por lo tanto, tiene el potencial de acelerar el crecimiento económico en Asia Pacífico, África y Europa Central y Oriental. Un informe del Consejo Previsional Mundial (WPC, por sus siglas en inglés) estima que Asia, excluida China, requiere hasta US$900 mil millones de inversiones en infraestructura por año durante la próxima década, principalmente en instrumentos de deuda, lo que significa que hay un déficit del 50 %en el gasto en infraestructura en el continente.[14] La enorme necesidad de contar con capital a largo plazo explica por qué muchos jefes de estado de Asia y Europa del Este "expresaron gustosamente su interés en unirse a esta nueva institución financiera internacional centrada únicamente en los «activos reales» y el crecimiento económico impulsado por la infraestructura".[15].