Further Evidence on China’s B&R Impact on Host Countries’ Quality of Institutions

As it has now been over eight years since the introduction of the Belt and Road initiative, analysts and scholars continue to debate the impact of the initiative on host countries. Recent academic studies reported a mostly positive relationship between China’s Belt and Road investments and host countries, including the governance of the latter. However, these studies mainly utilised data compiled by Chinese institutions, and questions have often been raised as to the quality of the data. This paper conceptually replicated one such investigation but utilised datasets compiled by non-China sources. The empirical methodology followed a novel sequential model selection approach, removing criticisms on the flexibility of generalised method of moments (GMM) panel estimations for researchers. Robust results were obtained: China’s Belt and Road investments had a significant positive impact on some measures of governance from the World Bank, and no significant negative effects were found.