11 facts you should know about the vision

Next month, China will hold a high-level international cooperation forum on the Belt and Road Initiative that will focus on global recovery, rebalancing, renovation and reconnection in response to rising concerns about global governance. Proposed in 2013 and unlike traditional globalization backed by tariff reductions, the initiative is aimed at improving connectivity between regions and boosting global growth through infrastructure construction, among other things.

The initiative, which focuses on Eurasian infrastructure and better land and sea connectivity, is expected to elevate 3 billion people to middle class status by 2050 and help increase global trade by $2.5 trillion in the next decade.

There is good reason to believe that the initiative can hit its targets, because every $1 increase in infrastructure investment in developing economies can raise their imports by $7 US cents, half of which comes from developed countries, as Justin Yifu Lin, former vice-president of the World Bank, has said. In other words, the West, too, can benefit from an increase in exports as the initiative stimulates global infrastructure investment.