Evaluation of agricultural investment environment in countries around the Black Sea under the background of The Belt and Road

Abstract

The stable development of agriculture is of great significance to alleviate the problem of food insecurity. As a significant yield zone along the Belt and Road Initiative, the Black Sea area is an ideal object for China to invest in agriculture. Therefore, it is particularly important to evaluate the agricultural investment environment in this region reasonably and effectively. This paper selects the countries around the Black Sea as the research objects and uses an Entropy‐ technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution (TOPSIS) model to analyse the agricultural investment environment and its influencing factors. The results show that: (a) There are significant differences in the agricultural investment environment among the six countries around the Black Sea, ranking as follows: Russia(0.5583) > Bulgaria(0.4782) > Georgia(0.4072) > Ukraine(0.3539) > Turkey(0.3493) > Romania(0.3167); (b) in primary indexes, agricultural production conditions, political environment, and social development have a relatively large impact, among which agricultural production is the most important factor; (c) among the secondary indexes, human capital index and railway (total kilometres) have high levels of impact. Unemployment rate, inflation rate and employment in agriculture (% of total employment) also have a significant impact. On this basis, suggestions are put forward according to the research results.