excludes the Moscow‐Beijing high speed rail or the Bering Strait connection, which were proposed but have no real plans. Moreover, condition 3 excludes small road projects in Cambodia that are clearly not along any shortest path linking major cities.

We then simplify the list of projects from Reed and Trubetskoy (2018) and keep only the rail and maritime elements. Then, to ensure consistency with the information on the ground, we validate it with the help of World Bank country teams. As a result, the exact list of all projects used in the analysis and sources can be found in Table A1 in annex. We then geo‐localize each of these projects in our map and generate links with the current rail lines, ports and maritime links, which creates a denser transportation network on which we can run our shortest path algorithm.

Beyond the data by Reed and Trubetskoy (2018), other sources of information on BRI investment have been compiled elsewhere and might have different inclusion criteria. One example is the WIND BRI database, which gathers China’s Oversea Direct Investment (ODI) projects in BRI countries. Compared to the data used in our paper, this source is both more restrictive along certain aspects as it contains only projects that are associated with ODI, and at the same time more extensive in the sectoral coverage. Moreover, it comprises planned projects for which ODI amounts have been announced, which is likely to be more restrictive than our definition. Note that some projects still appear in both our list and the WIND database, such as the Malaysia East Coast Rail Link Project or the Moscow‐Kazan High Speed Rail Project. Another example of alternative source is the database collected by Reconnecting Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)<sup>8</sup> which includes transportation projects (roads, rails, ports, bridges and tunnels) as well as other elements such as electrification projects of special economic zones in Asia.

# **c. Working assumptions**

_The multimodal network used in this analysis was constructed by merging two types of features: maritime and rail._<sup>_9_</sup> _These features are largely non‐overlapping and separated in space. The shortest path algorithm is used to find the shortest routing (in terms of shipping time) between any city‐pair in our network and taking into account all possible ways to link the origin city to the destination city. In order to find such optimal route, each network element is associated with a time cost which is accumulated along the route to sum up to the total shipping time. Time is then calculated as the segment length divided by speed, where the speed of distinctive features is presented in_ Table 1.

_Table 1: Speed assumption for different transport modes_

|**Description**<br>**Pre‐BRI**<br>**Post‐BRI**|
|---|

> 8 The database is available online at https://reconnectingasia.csis.org/

> 9 On top of rail and maritime networks, there are a few particular cases where we added road segments for cities characterized by extremely low or inexistent rail connectivity. This happened in exactly 8 cases for the following cities: Osh (Kyrgyzstan), Kabul (Afghanistan), Thimpu (Bhutan), Kigali (Rwanda), Guatemala City & Mixco (Guatemala), San Salvador (El Salvador), León & Managua (Nicaragua) and Belmopan (Belize). In those cases, we used a speed of 25km/h for the associated road segment.

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