Abstract
The paper deals with the interplay of major international infrastructure initiatives, in particular China’s Belt and Road Initiative, Japan’s Partnership for Quality Infrastructure and the EU strategy on “Connecting Europe and Asia”. Their co-evolution is interpreted as the creation and further development of a new market, whose characteristics like its complexity, its properties as an international public good and its oligopolistic supply structure create interesting insights. The paper finds that initiatives have adjusted to each other, in line with expectations from a market perspective. While China’s initiative at first followed a “low-price” strategy, Japan reacted with a “quality infrastructure” approach, also winning support from multilateral fora like G7 and G20. With the Second Belt and Road Forum, China has signaled to move closer to this line as well, and the EU is pursuing a similar approach as Japan, signing a partnership agreement with it. Interpreting this interaction as an oligopolistic structure, a chaotic competitive process has so far been avoided. The contest is actually evolving towards superior solutions, raising the quality of institutional infrastructure initiatives and, hopefully, of specific projects as well.
Highlights
China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) for infrastructure development in Eurasia and beyond is one of the most intensively monitored developments in international economic relations in recent years
It is plausible that China already in this early phase was aware of a need to further adjust its strategy, either because of new market entrants, which would lead to actionreaction cycles in an oligopolistic environment, or due to learning effects
President Xi Jinping stressed three major points to develop BRI further (Xi 2019): He formulated a “principle of extensive consultation, joint contribution and shared benefits”, which implies that BRI will become more multilateral, as the earlier bilateralism had been met with doubts due to the asymmetric relationships, He acknowledged “open, green and clean cooperation”, taking up points like transparency and environmental sustainability that had become major concerns of the strive for quality infrastructure, And he alluded to a “high standard cooperation to improve people's lives and promote sustainable development”, underlining similar points further, stressing poverty alleviation and socio-economic development
Summary
China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) for infrastructure development in Eurasia and beyond is one of the most intensively monitored developments in international economic relations in recent years. It is usually covered from an international relations perspective, focusing on political interests and stakeholders as well as geo-political considerations of actors. This paper employs a different perspective: The commencement and progress of initiatives like BRI in 2013 and Japan’s Partnership for Quality Infrastructure (PQI) in 2015 is interpreted as the creation and further development of a new market, whose characteristics like the complexity of its very idiosyncratic product(s), its properties as an international public good and its oligopolistic supply structure create interesting and sometimes underrated insights. The paper analyzes the EU’s strategy from this perspective, which manifested itself resolutely only as late as September 2018 with the release of the Joint Communication on “Connecting Europe and Asia: Building blocks for an EU Strategy” (EC-HR 2018)
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