Belt and Road Initiative and Railway Sector Efficiency—Application of Networked Benchmarking Analysis

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a lot of attention paid to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which aims to invest in better connecting China, South-East Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East and Europe. As countries that share the same continent, and are in many cases without proper sea connection (landlocked), the key mode of long-distance transportation is railways. However, numerous countries have different levels of past investments, labor productivity, transportation profile, and culture surrounding railways, and all of this leads to differences in overall efficiency. In this research, we apply well established and widely used data envelopment analysis (DEA) to evaluate the longitudinal efficiency of railway operations. This is the first time such an analysis is completed on the Belt and Road member countries. Efficiency itself hardly improved at all during the examination period, whether in passenger and freight or just freight transports. China itself represents an important benchmark for many countries, as its efficiency is all the time highest possible. In the network benchmarking analysis, it was shown that China, Estonia, Latvia, and Israel are often proposed benchmarks for the others to increase their efficiency in the future. From efficiency development perspective, Chinese railway sector is beneficial and more balanced to be benchmarked as compared to other significantly sized railway countries, like India or Russia.

Risks and Strategies of China’s Direct Investment in Central Asia from the Perspective of Big Data

“…Pan Sukun found that communication infrastructure is a non negligible factor affecting China's investment location choice in developed countries along the line. At the same time, he pointed out that the quality of the system and the location choice of OFDI have a regulatory effect [13]. Li Jianjun believes that location selection is the first factor to be considered in China's investment decision-making, and uses panel data to analyze the impact of the institutional quality of the target country and the institutional quality distance between the target country and the home country on China's OFDI location selection [14].…”

Does China’s Outward Direct Investment Improve the Institutional Quality of the Belt and Road Countries?

“…Extant literature has examined the effect of FDI on host countries through various perspectives. Some scholars have examined the impact of FDI on host countries' productivity [48,49], de-industrialization [50,51], and economic growth [38], while others have investigated the influence of FDI on the institutional quality of host countries and tried to disentangle the mechanisms behind it [3].…”

“…While the B&R initiative encompasses many areas of economic integration and global governance [35], it is specifically an infrastructure-led economic integration plan for integrating China's trading partners by developing their infrastructure (i.e., ports, roads, airports, railways, etc.,).The initiative manifests a Chinese commitment to investing in a variety of infrastructure projects in order to strengthen the economic capacity and connectivity among the B&R countries [36]. In the recent past scholars have paid considerable attention to this initiative which has specifically aimed to invest in better connecting Europe, Middle East, Central Asia, South-East Asia, and China [37][38][39][40]. Along with economic integration the B&R initiative is also considered as a vehicle toward sustainable development [41][42][43].…”

Diversification of Indonesian Export Markets to Non-Traditional Countries

“…With Pivot, Clarke (2016) analyzes the opportunities and challenges of Eurasia China. While the study of Li and Hilmola (2019) is more of a literature review study related to One Belt One Road.…”