Co-finance for energy project under the Belt and Road Initiative: an application of evidential reasoning-group decision-making method.

Abstract

Cooperation among consortium countries for energy projects under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) faces various uncertainties, and urges institutional investors to choose the co-finance mode to diversify the investment risk of energy projects. Recently, responsible investing in energy finance has been raised as a path to make the BRI greener. However, few studies focused on the issue on how to make the optimal decision in the process of collaboration. Therefore, this study constructed the financial-environment, social, and governance (F-ESG) evaluation indicator system from the perspective of responsible investors and proposed an integrated evidential reasoning group decision-making (ER-GDM) model. Then, programmed algorithms were designed to analyze and visualize the selection of the desired alternative. Finally, we applied the evaluation framework to the co-finance for four energy projects under the BRI. The results showed that after multiple rounds of discussion and negotiation (DAN), the consensus level reached 95.1%. It depicts that the optimized collective opinion has been obtained despite heterogeneous preferences. The analysis framework and proposed model in this study not only help international investors to co-finance energy project efficiently but also provide a solution for policy-makers to realize sustainable and high-quality cooperation in investment and financing under the BRI.