Credit rating agencies’ views on China’s Belt and Road Initiative
Journal: Eurasian Geography and Economics
Year: 2024

How do credit rating agencies (CRAs) view China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)? Our analysis of 132 countries in 2000-17 demonstrates that Chinese foreign investment adversely affects sovereign ratings of recipient countries when these countries participate officially in the BRI but is otherwise insignificant. These results indicate that rather than being a generic China bias, the BRI bias is a geopolitical bias, based on CRA's expectation that BRI recipients become more dependent economically