Mapping continental ambitions

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) will have its biggest impact on small, high-risk, frontier markets in South, Southeast, and Central Asia. As measured by BMI Research’s Key Projects Database, the value of prospective, planned, and ongoing China-backed infrastructure projects in countries like Laos, Cambodia, Kyrgyzstan, and Pakistan dwarfs their historic spending on infrastructure development, and indeed even their current gross domestic product. These countries stand to benefit from improvements to their transport and power infrastructure assets, but the sheer size of proposed projects raises questions about their suitability for the market and the risky business environments of ...

China's President Xi Jinping promises that his Belt and Road Initiative, a sweeping vision to put China at the center of the global economy through new infrastructure, trade deals and other connections, was a "plan in the sunshine."

But ...