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Italy Joins China's New Silk Road Project
91–100 of 164 posts
Re: Italy Joins China's New Silk Road Project
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
That only means that the US DOES rely on economic hitmen, it doesn't necessarily mean China does NOT have economic hitmen.
umm... OBOR could the Chinese version of IMF and World bank, who knows?
The World Bank already exists and China was the second largest borrower from it between 2013-2018. Read that again, it's not a mistake. At a time when China was booming and loaning out money on the OBOR, they were simultaneously the second largest borrower from the World Bank. So what are they really doing with OBOR?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-12/china-s-t...
Re: Italy Joins China's New Silk Road Project
#93Hmm. Italy allies with an evil dictatorship that has a concentration camps for millions of minorities, and prosecutes religion by shutting down churches and jailing pastors. Sounds familiar...
The US has allied itself with China since the 80s...
The US is not an ally of China. It cooperates with China to maintain peaceful military and political relations in Asia and it has vast trade with China. There's a dramatic, fundamental difference between being an ally and being a global competitor that you try to get along with (ie try not to go to war with as you collide repeatedly on matters of perceived national interest).
Britain, France, Germany, Poland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, Philippines, etc. Those are allies of the US. I don't think there's actually much confusion in the difference between a US ally relationship like Britain and the modern US relationship with China.
Re: Italy Joins China's New Silk Road Project
#94> "The seemingly innocuous move comes at a sensitive time for Europe and the European Union, where there is suddenly a great deal of trepidation not only about China, but about working out how Europe or the EU should adapt and react to a changing world," Prof Frankopan told the BBC. Forgive my ignorance, but aren't many EU decisions required to be unanimous? So if China has close ties to Italy, could it use it's infl…
Hungary does this already in the EU for Russia
https://www.unian.info/politics/10270653-hungarian-top-diplo...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-hungary-putin-orba...
Re: Italy Joins China's New Silk Road Project
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
The belt and road initiative is actually a response to the failure of Chinese central planning. So much of China's economy is specialized in construction at this point that they can't risk the mass unemployment that would result from popping the construction bubble, so instead they're doing everything they can--building high speed trains to nowhere, building infrastructure in other countries, building entire cities t…
Also, infrastructure does not lead to economic growth. Quite the other way around, really.
It's a sliding scale of return. If your infrastructure is already decent, you will see a terrible return on your investment, as in the case of Japan's debacle of decades of infrastructure investment that produced negative real growth (due to the debt vs growth generated).
If you're China in 1980 or 1990 (ie third world infrastructure), vast infrastructure spend will faciliate your decades-long growth explosion. Without that, you can't become China of 2019, you can't actually go from a $400b economy to a $14t economy. The ports, roads, rail, bridges, utilities, energy generation, et al. is a requirement and produces extraordinary returns in a context like that. It drastically boosts economic productivity and raises your maximum output potential by a lot.
As another recently discussed (on HN) example, Romania has had one of the world's fastest growing economies in recent years. Economically it's attempting to push into a solid middle-tier economic nation, in the footsteps of countries like Poland, Chile or Slovakia. Romania simultaneously has a horribly lagging roads network that is in desperate need of expansion and improvement. It's very likely that properly building out their roads infrastructure would help facilitate their economic boom continuing; and that not doing so, would act as a serious point of friction on growth long-term. You can't get to $25k GDP per capita, with roads built for a $2k GDP per capita economy.
Re: Italy Joins China's New Silk Road Project
#96> The European Union is also worried about unfair competition from Chinese companies, which are controlled by the Chinese government and benefit from the state’s financial backing. So... like many European companies and even entire sectors?
Besides Oil and Gas, which companies are state owned? Bonus points: which of those states are authoritarian?
I didn't say state-owned, I said they had economical backing from the state. Many of them. Just look at the bottom of many European websites and you'll see the logo of the EU.
Whether the states are authoritarian or not is irrelevant to me and to the question.
Re: Italy Joins China's New Silk Road Project
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
The belt and road initiative is actually a response to the failure of Chinese central planning. So much of China's economy is specialized in construction at this point that they can't risk the mass unemployment that would result from popping the construction bubble, so instead they're doing everything they can--building high speed trains to nowhere, building infrastructure in other countries, building entire cities t…
Also, infrastructure does not lead to economic growth. Quite the other way around, really.
It does to a certain point, but then you run into diminishing returns. China needed to build infrastructure in the 80's and 90's because a lack of infrastructure was a bottleneck for further economic growth. Now they're building infrastructure primarily as a means of exerting political power (e.g. integrating western China with high speed rail and Belt and Road).
Re: Italy Joins China's New Silk Road Project
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. That is my major concern. In fact, it has already happened! We have already Greece (with its China owned ports) blocking an EU statement: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-un-rights/greece-block...
In fairness, from the perspective of the average Greek citizen, the EU thing hasn't worked out terribly well for their homeland. In the West what we need is to restructure our facilities such that if you participate you will prosper. We need for everyone to prosper. Not necessarily equally, but what happened to Greece went beyond simply not prospering as much as other nations. It was legitimately negatively impacted.…
Also, the whole reason Greek ports are owned by China in the first place is that Germany forced the Greek government to sell them off to the highest bidder as part of their great economic fucking-over of Greece. So it's hard to have a huge amount of sympathy if this causes headaches for the core EU states.
Re: Italy Joins China's New Silk Road Project
#99China need to win over India if it wants Belt and Road.
Re: Italy Joins China's New Silk Road Project
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trains are still the most fuel economical way to transport products through long distances. And trains can also transport loads to intermediary locations in a much more efficient way than ships.
No, they are not. Ships try to deliver cargo as deep in the country as possible. Then trucks take over ( Europe), because of different destinations. You think they are joining the world trade order, I just see an expensive debt trap that won't even change 0,1% in a countries trade
The advantage of trucks over trains isn't as large as you seem to believe. E.g. at the port of Hamburg, the majority of cargo (55%) is transported onwards by truck, but the share of trains (42.8%) isn't that much smaller. https://www.hafen-hamburg.de/en/statistics/modalsplit