On the business side of New Silk Road news and reports this week, Deloitte’s policy report [Embracing the BRI Ecosystem in 2018] paints a broad yet nuanced picture of both risks and opportunities in the BRI ecosystem. It offers an analysis of ‘navigating pitfalls and seizing opportunities’ across the vast geography of BRI. The three key findings of the report are:
1 ‘BRI is much more than a Chinese-funded infrastructure project’. Developing and increasingly developed countries are involved. This multiplicity of actors (with their bilateral and multilateral agreements) creates common security in BRI.
2. ‘Opportunities will become increasingly plentiful, but a longer timeframe is needed when measuring returns - 10–15 years rather than 3–5.’
3. And finally, ‘BRI is a collaborative ecosystem that to date has focused on energy and infrastructure, but that over the next five years and beyond will evolve to concentrate on trade, manufacturing, the Internet, tourism and other aspects.’
In a more security-oriented approach, The CSIS brief [The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue and the Maritime Silk Road Initiative] reports on the major security shifts in the Asia-Pacific in the last decade. In this context, the Quadrilateral security dialogue (between India, Japan, Australia, and the US) has been revitalized. The dialogue in 2017 focused on collective security concerns of these four actors in the backdrop of the Chinese Maritime Silk Road. However, the brief points out, “the official readouts of the meeting differed’, suggesting threat perceptions vary among these countries in terms of the new security developments in the Indo-Pacific.
M. Forough
This week's Silk Road Headlines
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