Hello and welcome. You are listening to Patrick Boyle on Finance, a podcast exploring ideas from quantitative finance, examining events occurring in markets right now and financial history to see what lessons can be taken away, including interviews with some of the most interesting people in the world of finance. To learn more about the podcast, visit onfinance.org.

China's Belt and Road Initiative is the largest transnational infrastructure program ever

undertaken by a single country. It was launched in 2013 and is President Xi's signature policy.

Its goal was to build out global infrastructure and boost China's influence around the world.

Most of the countries that signed up to borrow under the program were developing nations

with weak credit ratings.

Over the last decade, China's cumulative engagement in the project comes to $932 billion,

which is made up of $561 billion in construction contracts and $371 billion in investments. A lot of important infrastructure projects were

built around the world under the Belt and Road Initiative. A railway line from the

Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa to the port of Djibouti has cut the journey time from around

three days to 12 hours, a huge improvement.

Hydropower dams built in Uganda have provided electricity and been opened up as tourist destinations.

Roads and pipelines built across Central Asia and Southeast Asia have driven growth in those parts of the world too.

Unfortunately, there have also been quite a few wasteful projects like huge skyscrapers and sports

stadiums in developing countries that run up debt and do little to benefit the population.

Allegations of corruption have dogged many of the high-profile Belt and Road Initiative

projects too.

The core project was and is hugely ambitious, affecting around 65% of the world's population,

covering one-third of the world's GDP and about a quarter of all of the

goods and services that get moved around the world.

Now a decade into the project, many of the emerging market countries who borrowed from China

have found themselves in financial distress, and not just because of the size of the loans they've taken.

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