China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Reducing or Increasing the World Uncertainties?

Although worldwide poverty, a basic concern of John Kenneth Galbraith, is reducing on average, I argue that poverty remains a critical issue in many countries. This led the Chinese government to propose the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013. Broadly, the BRI constructs a cross-continental nexus between countries to reduce their development uncertainties by increasing their connectivity. As a result, the Chinese government has invested trillions of infrastructure dollars in projects that have been introduced to the involved countries as sovereign debt along with the participation of Chinese multinational corporations. Although evidence has shown that this initiative is gaining increasingly more support from the less-developed countries, signs of uncertainty in various forms have clearly emerged. In light of such, I propose that possible in-country political instability, political conflicts among the participating countries, national debt defaults, and competition between China and the United States of America in regional influence may have added to the underlying uncertainties that have challenged the world.