"China’s Outward Investments And Global Sustainability" - By CWP Alum Meir Alkon
China’s outward investments are likely to have a substantial impact on global sustainability. Through capital, technology, and standards, China’s investments, including through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), have the potential to act as catalysts for sustainable, climate-conscious development—or to accelerate resource depletion, pollution, biodiversity loss, and carbon-intensive resource depletion. This policy paper draws from several pieces of research analyzing the political economy of China’s outward investments and consequent environmental impacts. Findings from these analyses cast doubt on the narrative that domestic overcapacity is the major driver of outward Chinese investment in coal-fired power; show that political favoritism in recipient countries exacerbates the environmental impacts, including deforestation, of China’s investments; and point to early evidence of a growing anti-China bias in energy infrastructure development among recipient country citizens. Together, these findings highlight the need for more nuance in policymaker models of BRI investments and their environmental impacts, with particular attention to the interaction between recipient country politics and China’s unique, state-capitalist political economy. These findings suggest that U.S. government agencies can best support sustainable, climate-conscious development by working to enhance institutional standards, bureaucratic capacity, and stakeholder engagement in recipient countries, so that they are able to channel investment financing toward needed development while reducing elite capture and mitigating environmental and climate impacts.
Meir Alkon is an Assistant Professor at Fordham University and a NonResident Fellow at Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center and a 2021–22 Wilson China Fellow1
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/uploads/documents/Alkon_China%27s%20Outward%20Investments%20and%20Global%20Sustainability.pdf
Meir is an Assistant Professor at Fordham University and a former Harvard Environmental Fellow at the Department of Government and the Harvard University Center for the Environment. He is also an associate in research at Harvard’s Fairbank Center and a non-resident fellow at the Global China Initiative at Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center. Meir received his PhD jointly from Princeton’s Department of Politics and School of Public and International Affairs. His research bridges political economy and interdisciplinary approaches to public policy, analyzing the behavioral and institutional foundations of environmental and economic governance.
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