China - Africa Trade and Investment Relations Under the Belt and Road Initiative

Mrdaković Sanela () and Todorović Miloš ()
Additional contact information
Mrdaković Sanela: University of Niš, Faculty od Economics, Republic of Serbia
Todorović Miloš: University of Niš, Faculty od Economics, Republic of Serbia

Economic Themes, 2023, vol. 61, issue 2, 171-196

Abstract: China’s investment activities and infrastructure development in Africa under the Belt and Road Initiative (“BRI”) have changed the prospects of economic cooperation between African countries and Asia’s largest economy. Africa plays a prominent role in one of the key BRI corridors, which explains China’s active engagement on the continent through the construction of hard infrastructure, port development and trade and investment activities. China is Africa’s largest bilateral trading partner and foreign direct investor. This paper analyses China’s investments and trade flows with Africa, the importance of African countries for the BRI and China-Africa relations within the geopolitical triangle US-EU-Russia. We applied correlation analysis to assess the intensity of the relationship between FDI and trade and an autoregressive model to extrapolate import and export data for a given period with the aim of forecasting trends in the development of China - Africa economic relations. Empirical results indicate a strong correlation between China’s FDI to African countries and their trade flows. The autoregressive model estimates a substantial increase in their trade flows, which, along with China’s infrastructural development in Africa, suggests a change in the dynamics of their trade cooperation and in the geographical structure of African countries’ foreign trade.

Keywords: China-Africa economic relations; BRI; Silk Road; Chinese FDI in Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L16 L52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.2478/ethemes-2023-0009 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:vrs:ecothe:v:61:y:2023:i:2:p:171-196:n:8

DOI: 10.2478/ethemes-2023-0009

Access Statistics for this article

Economic Themes is currently edited by Marija Radosavljević

More articles in Economic Themes from Sciendo
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().