How does the development of transportation related to the BRI affects the CO2 emissions for countries that are not part of the initiative

Abstract

Since its official launch in 2013, China’s massive infrastructure development and connectivity project, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has attracted the attention of many experts and policymakers across academic fields. While BRI’s impact on member countries as well as on other continents such as Europe and America has been widely discussed, little focus has been brought on non-member Asian countries. Will these nations be able to indirectly access the international network through their neighboring BRI members, or will they be left behind while others thrive? The aim of this paper is to answer the research question: “What is the effect of infrastructure development under the BRI on non-participating countries ?”. To answer the question, this paper attempts to explain the GDP per capita of Asian countries between 2013 and 2020. To achieve that, this paper tries to find the impact of the investment in infrastructure and construction in neighboring BRI members (the variable of interest). Two multiple linear regression models are compared. First, the OLS with time-fixed effects; then the Fixed-effect model with time-fixed effect. The latter has the advantage of accounting for unobserved heterogeneity. This thesis shows that the coefficient between the observed variable and the dependent variable is not statistically significant. Hence the results cannot infer the relationship between BRI infrastructure development in neighboring countries and domestic economic growth.