Abstract
With the implementation of China’s “Going Out” strategy and “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI) as well as the shortage of domestic hydropower market, the scale of hydropower investment along BRI by Chinese companies has expanded rapidly. However, these countries have great differences in politics, laws, economy, hydropower potential, social development and environmental constraints. Due to the inappropriate choice of countries for investment, many failure cases have also occurred. To specifically evaluate hydropower investment in these countries, this paper proposed a six-dimensional indicator system which can represents the characteristics of hydropower investment along BRI based on the analysis of the typical cases of overseas investment by Chinese enterprises. Furthermore, a fuzzy optimal model based on the Delphi-Entropy weight was constructed to evaluate the hydropower investment of 65 countries along BRI as well as a list of countries and corresponding investment grades are proposed. The result indicates that politics and hydropower industry factors are the key determinants of choosing the countries for conducting investment while legal, economic, social and environmental factors should also be covered. In conclusion, the optimal choices for China’s hydropower investment along BRI are Russia, Pakistan, Malaysia, Kazakhstan and Indonesia and the strategy has been given accordingly. Moreover the policy recommendations from the perspective of nation and enterprise level have also been proposed.
Highlights
In 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping proposed the “Belt and Road Initiative” in accordance with changes in the world’s situation which is the Chinese government’s commitment to maintain the global trading and open economic system, and promote cooperation and mutual benefit between nations
Due to the hydropower resources that can be developed are very limited in China, investing in hydropower along BRI is of great significance to the sustainable development of Chinese enterprises abroad and can help BRI countries to improve electrification and reduce pollutant emissions as well
As there is no relevant research on the country evaluation of hydropower investment and it is difficult to fully collect basic information and data of BRI countries, it is necessary to analyze the typical failure cases of Chinese enterprises’ overseas investment and find key factors which are presented in Table 1 [27,28]
Summary
In 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping proposed the “Belt and Road Initiative” in accordance with changes in the world’s situation which is the Chinese government’s commitment to maintain the global trading and open economic system, and promote cooperation and mutual benefit between nations. China’s BRI is of great significance to global economic development. Chinese enterprises have participated in the investment and construction of about 320 overseas hydropower projects with a total installed capacity of 81 GW, which is more than 30 billion US dollars investment [1]. Hydropower is a clean and renewable energy with the properties of green, sustainability, high-efficiency and operation flexibility which can effectively reduce carbon dioxide emissions and optimize energy structure as well as the top priority choice for energy development in most countries along BRI [2]. Due to the hydropower resources that can be developed are very limited in China, investing in hydropower along BRI is of great significance to the sustainable development of Chinese enterprises abroad and can help BRI countries to improve electrification and reduce pollutant emissions as well
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