Authors
Leonardo E. Stanley
Publication date
2018
Book
Building Development for a New Era: China's Infrastructure Projects in Latin America and the Caribbean
Pages
77-101
Publisher
Enrique Dussel Peters, Ariel C. Armony, and Shoujun Cui
Description
Three decades of growth at annualized two-digit rates placed China as the world’s second largest economy. One defining feature of this achievement lies in the massive program of infrastructure investment, which sustained the aforementioned records while increasing the economy’s competitiveness (Straub et al. 2007). The massive accumulation of external surplus is another distinctive feature of China’s ascension, which transformed the country into the world’s largest creditor (Cheung and de Haan 2013). The importance of infrastructure was reaffirmed after the 2008 global financial crisis, when the Chinese government introduced a huge fiscal stimulus package (Lardy 2012) emphasizing investment, which increased the capacity of Chinese infrastructure firms. Furthermore, in order to gain competitiveness, authorities favored an industry concentration process. After decades of being ranked among the world’s largest recipients of foreign direct investments, in 1999 the Chinese government initiated the go-out policy to promote Chinese investments abroad. This policy transformed the Middle Kingdom into a net capital exporter (Shambaugh 2013). 1 State-owned banks accompanied this outbound path from the onset. A “big pockets” trend (large financial resources from China’s developmental banks supporting the go-out policy), which has been particularly active in Africa (Brautigam 2009), is gaining momentum in Latin America (Dussel Peters 2013). Finally, the outbound investment boom led by Chinese infrastructure firms is also helping authorities in their effort to internationalize the RMB (Liu et al. 2017; Zhang 2016).
Total citations
2019202020212022202342971