Risk assessment of China's overseas energy investments considering the response ability to major risk events: A case study of COVID-19

Abstract

This paper constructs a new risk evaluation index system for overseas energy investment, while considering the country's response ability to major risk events using COVID-19 as experience. The entropy weight method and the TOPSIS (Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution) method are used to conduct overall and sub-dimensional risk assessment for 52 countries. The results show that: (1) among the seven risk dimensions considered, the response ability to major risk events dimension has the highest weight, accounting for 16.47 %. This indicates that Chinese energy corporations cannot ignore the risk posed by major risk events, such as COVID-19, in their overseas investments. (2) Among the 52 countries investigated, investment risk is significantly lower in developed countries than in developing countries, mainly because of the better performance of the former across the four dimensions of economics foundation, governing ability, social development, and investment environment. (3) The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the landscape of China's overseas energy investment risk. Due to the different performance of each country in other dimensions, the risk rankings of the majority of developing countries decreased when considering their COVID-19 response, while that of most developed countries increased.