AGI Lecture - Matthew P Goodman - Belt and Road: A Washington Perspective

Major powers are engaged in a new competition to build hard infrastructure – including roads, railways, and ports—across the broadly defined Eurasian land mass.

China’s Belt & Road Initiative is the most ambitious; the cost of President Xi Jinping’s signature initiative is estimated to reach as high as US$4 trillion. But Japan has also announced its own US$200 billion “quality infrastructure” initiative, even as ASEAN, India, Russia, Turkey, and other regional powers have their own visions for connectivity.

Matthew Goodman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies described a project he is overseeing called Reconnecting Asia, which maps out infrastructure projects across Europe and Asia. It tries to shed light on the economic drivers and implications of these investments, as well as the challenges they are likely to face.