This week’s Silk Road news contains much on the pushback against and the challenges in the way of implementing The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). A new World Bank report [Trade Facilitation Challenges and Reform Priorities for Maximizing the Impact of the Belt and Road Initiative], looking at the six BRI corridors, has found out that ‘most of these trade corridors perform below global averages’ in terms of trade facilitation. The report then identifies six broad priority areas for reform and goes on to enumerate some concrete steps to implement reform in each corridor. Finally, the report concludes that BRI is ‘an opportunity to continue, rather than start afresh, the reform agenda in participating countries’. This approach will reduce already existing regulatory complexity as opposed to creating new complexities.
The euobserver article [Germany urges EU to rival China in Western Balkans] addresses the increasing concern of EU and US leaders about the influence of China, Russia, and even Turkey in the Balkans, where China has considerable BRI investments. Speaking to the Bundestag on Sept 12, German Foreign Minister, Heiko Maas, said that ‘it's important that we offer these [Western Balkan] countries a European perspective, and a reliable one, because they're otherwise turning to other countries, such as China’. European Commission president, Juncker, told MEPs on the same day that Europe can export stability, otherwise ‘our immediate neighborhood will be shaped by others’, without naming names. Not too daunting a task to guess the names though. The region is the focus of intense geopolitical and geo-economic attention these days in the lead-up to Macedonia’s referendum (Sept 30) on a name-deal with Greece and the emerging land-swap deal between Serbia and Kosovo. EU and NATO leaders are flocking to Macedonia to support the pro-European government.
M. Forough
This week's Silk Road Headlines
|
To increase awareness of and facilitate the debate on China's Belt and Road Initiative, the Clingendael Institute publishes Silk Road Headlines, a weekly update on relevant news articles from open sources.
For a free subscription to Silk Road Headlines please click here.
For past editions please view our archive.
We link to sites purely on editorial merit. The inclusion of a link to an external website from Silk Road Headlines should not be understood to be an endorsement of that website or the site's owners (or products/services).
|
