The belt and road initiative: a spatial empirical analysis of economic performance in Central Asia and the South Caucasus

Alter Kahraman and Mehmet Özcan

Journal of the Asia Pacific Economy, 2025, vol. 30, issue 3, 913-934

Abstract: This article focuses on China’s FDIs and mutual trade with five Central Asian countries, three South Caucasus countries and Iran within the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The study examines how the interaction of mutual foreign trade and China’s FDIs affects longitudinal income changes in these countries and to what extent the empirical evidence can demonstrate the significance of China’s investments and trade on their economic growth. Employing panel-spatial econometric models, the study assesses whether a discernible increase in total income occurred before and after 2013, exploring potential spillover effects from the spatial neighborhoods. The findings from the panel regression model reveal that the labor stock and the amount of foreign direct investments from China do not exhibit a statistically significant effect on the economic growth of these countries. However, the BRI positively impacted these economies, primarily through enhanced trade with China rather than FDIs from China.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13547860.2024.2325252 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:rjapxx:v:30:y:2025:i:3:p:913-934

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rjap20

DOI: 10.1080/13547860.2024.2325252

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of the Asia Pacific Economy is currently edited by Leong Liew

More articles in Journal of the Asia Pacific Economy from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().