Permalink Reply by chris macrae on October 19, 2018 at 8:01am

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by chris macrae on October 19, 2018 at 8:42am

help with guided tours around world record jobs creator Jack Ma

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by chris macrae on October 19, 2018 at 9:42am

Sample of world record jobs profiles and 13 most energetic world trade maps

#BR6 USA, Ca

Elon Musk

Jerry Yang

Bejos & Leonis

Quadirs & BRAC

Berners Lee & MIT

Yo Yo Ma % IM Pei

Kissinger

Justin Trudeau

Borlaug RIP

Ray Andersen RIP

#BR5 W Euro

Prince Charles

Pope Francis

Soros

Danny Alexander

BBC nature

#BR4 E Euro

Lichtenstein (blockchain)

Schwab

#BR3 Russia

Gorbachev

#BR2 S Asia

Sir Fazle Abed

Nilekani

CK Prahalad decesased

#BE1 Far East

CEO soiftbank

Mahbubani

Moon Jae-In

#BR12 UN+

Guterres

Jack Ma ,

Melinda Gates

heads of UNCTAD, UNHABITART and UNGA

Jim Kim WB

#BR11 Arctic Circle

#BR10

Latin America

Paulo Freire

#BR9 Africa

#BR8 Med Sea

#BR7 Mid East & Stans

Sheikha Moza

Queen Rania

Founding family Dubai Supercity

#BR0 China Xi Jinping , Jin Liquin, Leaders of baidu ten cent (Ma see BR12) Guo Guangchang

Old Word Trade

Up to 1500, the main world trade map looked like this.

Crossroads Beirut: N & W to Europe, South and West to Africa- East along latitude 30 all across Asia to China : The Silk Road. Those places in Europe and Africa sharing med sea coastal belt could sail to and from Beirut . Few people explored the whole silk road like Marco Polo's 7 year trek, Rather it was a really hundreds of neighbors who kept traders safe and valued diversity of being connecfion of the world's market ( places didnt do that would be diverted round). Apart from gold, the main currencies came from China in form of spices and silks. Both light enough to transport- and the further they traded from their source of origin the more their rarity value appreciated

Then around 1500 came the discovery of two new mercantile navigation routes: west of Europe to the new world of the Americas and around Africa to the southern coastal belt of Asia , processes of colonization started. Unknowingly as well as knowingly the empire mindset dictated what it wanted to trade, when trade is all take with no regard to how the other side needs tio develop the result is the colonised economy become smaller and smaller. Those who had immigrated to USA ended this outcome with their declartaion of independence, but colonization of the old world by Euripe of Africa and Asia continued. Notably the British were the dominant colonisers of places facing that south Asian coastal belt. The whole of the Indian subcomtient – the largest population in the world was colonised. Their share of world market went down from over 20% to about 5%. By 1860 the English had got to China. Whilst not attempting to colonise China, the English proposed to pay for the highly desired speoices and silks with Opium. Soon the consequence was that China closed its borders to world trade for more than a century. Its share of production also plummeted from being close to its populations share of about 20% to something less than 10%. After 2 world wars it was clear that both the European pattern of big get bigger nation even if this means war or colonization needed to stop. Going post-colonial in a way that developed all the peoples entrepreneurial freedoms also not proved simple for many reasons - heritage of top-down rule, low tax base, many countries inheriting boundaries which may have been convenient for the empire in controling peoples with different cultures but were the borders don't make natural or trading sense (eg landlocked nations) All of this adds to the mapping that now needs to be made transparent if worldwide youth and livelihoods are to emerge as the sustainability generation in which every community thrives

From the viewpoint of 1946, the big lesson from world war 1 had been don’t punish the peoples of a losing nation by forfeiture of land. Offer them a peaceful way to redevelop as fast as possible. This America most generously did both to West Germany and to Japan in the far east. Adding to American this generosity, we would note this critical world record job creators of 1946-1967.

46-53 gandhi - prepping independence of a fifth of world's people, von neumann programabkle computing plus

53-60 deming leaps in engineering quality 60-67 jfk sigbature vision of mo0n race (assasinated 1963)

BRI.school - hear are some examples of Belt Road mapping along which today's world record jobs creators c0-create.

Because of both BRICS and SCO some fascinating colabikratiin projects are goin on woud br3 – they tend to specialize in helpoing people previously landlocked

Trains across 26 nations

Cyber security – when you have huge lands -internal security can be as much an issue as extrenal- alos boirders are complex

Drones etc for checking huge agricultiural space

Potentially the largest scale nww and old energy projects- which new ones woirk

Most countries part oftehse clubes have said

1 they want ecommerce training

2 thyey want to catch up on eg mobile paytets albeit in their own cntexts

3 they want to make -border documents steamlioned

It is quite likely that the whole of ursais will agree all but 10 big markets which can be a sme free tarde zone- they realise the peoples need ,local marklets

Br1

Where most useful engineering etach and leapfrogs has been innovated sinec 9150

These countries are mot wedded to wetsrn mass media so interested in much more human models

There are some graret specialities- singpapie=re way ahead on culture, properetty, learning (-new zzalend too)

There are great dispora connections whihch jack ma is able to tap into – Taiwan china hkonkong japan- by making digital progress he can help unite region past old greinave]=nces

The road top alibabolympics his hnt for markets he doesn’t know how to get to with commerce

Suoercitied isddeas shared between internal chuan cities br1 coties and who els

E

See also whet emit partrners – eg the 6 mit fablabs

Or wher shwab ir4 parthers

Or wher damo partbers

See pods – ansaluyis of 5 million starts ups why softbank bought we work

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++==

With nesrlybhalf of world ;population indai and chna need t share sustainabiliyu solution

China has yried to on

-railriads that cpuld be wini0wn for who,e ergeion

On new dev bankog projetsc

It would hbe happy to share lot of wht jack ma knows how to do- best match Nilekani

Bagldesh gork power has lot of simlutions it will share with any fireds of jack ma

Prince charels would happinly help to reconcile conflicts that after all uk mainly made as would other commonwealth memner

India needs health andedu tech that everyone else can help witg

-see alos un pamels where india and jack ma share space

Several wise winners some form s asia – as shpuld do city mintessori

Br2 where halp people live’where women have advane village world and bfreatest leapfrom odels for a billion have emerged

All of over village wprld, montessor ifor,at valued bta perantgly less so by indioa

Fgoes back to pre-digital dsys with brac and ckprahald

But mow poerntially in strorods – depend son which nig data small parrenrs jack m can make

And dependes where will there be edutech breaktgorpghs of same order of impa=oractoce as fintech

Sme basic agricultrure comes from br2

Sme luxury agriculture form br1 and bro

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by chris macrae on October 19, 2018 at 2:33pm

x

alternative discussions include BrandScotland.net

here is the idea - to 3 things on jack ma's mind -coming seen major videos illustrating his invitations to change the 3 worlds

of markets ,
education,
how worldwide youth and elders research the era of 1000 times to 4000 times more tech in a forward open collaborative action-solution-goal-led way instead of old backaward hierachical referential silos that will never match under 30's livelihoods to being tghe sustainability generation

he has always talked about which markets can he change so all smes (small medium enterprises) are valued by the market not just a few big organisations (this is also what ying has published 2 books on)

he talks about big data small platforms

if you run alipay (or bkash) you have all the data so you can analyse who to give credit to because they will entrepreneur it etc

in changing markets top left he talks about at lest 3 different platforms

markets he can get to with commerce but and sell things

markets he can get to with olympics are happiness markets like arts, fashions, active sports and communities for all-, communities built by the people and which are safe for girls to apprentice outside the classroom

and then there are markets you get to with new finance

if we move to top left CHANGING EDUCATION i have tried to put 7 of the most different areas of education he is working on - to village schools to issuing each year the un report than changes leaders minds the most but which also graduates should be exploring during that class year- they should use their summer vac to entrepreneur the new stuff

SDGS 17 sustainability development goals – eg see www.economistrefugee.com

MOVE TO the bottom -NOW QUESTION the idea that we all live in expoenentially multiplying change era linkedin by the last 14 year of sdgs 2016=2030 we are moving through 1000 to 4000 moore of communications tech changing society (search intel moores law if you not aware)

this is something my father projected as changing since 1946- dads stories on this started 50 years ago www.normanmacrae.net

: of course dad’s details are out of date but not hos hope that humanity can survive and even get happier out of every community the opposite of getting more monetized (anyone who uses that most hateful word is no friend of my family_

- but look at what tech people now say is changing- explore what dream you can make happen if you surf this reality with peers who are changing this now- better if you are the open space facilitator who has lots of peer networks

Example some say g5 instead of g4 as mobile connectivity-

they explain this as revolution where for first time ,hundred times more machines are using mobile and all the connections it makes than 7 billion humans

anyhow this is just one peer network of innovation where you need a combination of very tech people and very human

another compass of innovation: what will be the best human app of blockchain

another! what will be the most relevant robot teaching assistant designed for refugee children

please ask questions if you dont understand what I have tried to give you a quick guided tour of jack ma’s playground above

[somehow a version of this - maybe in chinese needs to be put in front of ying lowrey and we need to ask her for a few hours or a few students to discuss this with

do they have a better way of exploring both the jack of old redesigning sme markets what ying loves most or the new jack (from September 2019 when he says he’s back teaching full time) taking this to wherever people say they are educators or learners as well as debating world leaders deadlines

[7:00 AM, 10/19/2018] Chris Macrae: song if you and christian can look at this -by all means simplify but try to keep terms relevant to jack ma

[7:00 AM, 10/19/2018] Chris Macrae: once you understand it -please have a debate of it with kazi islam

[7:01 AM, 10/19/2018] Chris Macrae: if christain and you need help in contacting him please say

we need just a small number of people who can m,ke sure we are not missing a bug tech idea- and we then need to find ways to debate it with ying

or if she wont debate it i need to come to beijing and present it aiib or UNGA with mark thornton, or start student union club in Columbia then start sharing it with other friendship student cljubs (come over to Maryland for a weekend and see Harrison as well) and back in china to other tsinghua stsuents and at bridge cafe until we find who in beijing does want to link it in

[meanwhile i suggest anywhere that is important to you comes up with one question they would most like to ask to promote jack ma

you can see i have put my brandscotland question

i hope you will tell me if you dont understand ;pieces of above

[7:05 AM, 10/19/2018] Chris Macrae: i am not claiming this is pretty but we need some way of looking at all of tehse things at same time otherwise we have disastyers like brac silo of teaching ruining 5 days in dhaka that could have been world changing

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by chris macrae on October 19, 2018 at 2:45pm

these are the most exciting times to be alive

extract from 2024/2025 report written 1984The 20th C Economist's end poverty deputy editor Norman Macrae's alternative "little sister"/ womens empowerment" future alternative to macroeconomists', big-low-trust-tech: orwells big brother -

full book free download right hand side

Changing education

There has been a sea-change in the traditional ages on man. Compared with 1974 our children in 2024 generally go out to paid work (especially computer programming work) much earlier, maybe starting at nine, maybe at twelve, and we do not exploit them. But young adults of twenty-three to forty-five stay at home to play much more than in 1974; it is quite usual today for one parent (probably now generally the father, although sometimes the mother) to stay at home during the period when young children are growing up. And today adults of forty-three to ninety-three go back to school - via computerised learning - much more than they did in 1974.

In most of the rich countries in 2024 children are not allowed to leave school until they pass their Preliminary Exam. About 5 per cent of American children passed their exam last year before their eight birthday, but the median age for passing it in 2024 is ten-and-a-half, and remedial education is generally needed if a child has not passed it by the age of fifteen.

A child who passes his Prelim can decide whether to tale a job at once, and take up the remainder of his twelve years of free schooling later; or he can pass on to secondary schooling forthwith, and start to study for his Higher Diploma.

The mode of learning for the under-twelves is nowadays generally computer-generated. The child sits at home or with a group of friends or (more rarely) in an actual, traditional school building. She or he will be in touch with a computer program that has discovered , during a preliminary assessment, her or his individual learning pattern. The computer will decide what next questions to ask or task to set after each response from each child.

A school teacher assessor, who may live half a world away, will generally have been hired, via the voucher system by the family for each individual child. A good assessor will probably have vouchers to monitor the progress of twenty-five individual children, although some parents prefer to employ groups of assessors - one following the child's progress in emotional balance, one in mathematics, one in civilized living, and so on - and these groups band together in telecommuting schools.

Many communities and districts also have on-the-spot 'uncles' and 'aunts'. They monitor childrens' educational performance by browsing through the TC and also run play groups where they meet and get to know the children personally...

Some of the parents who have temporarily opted out of employment to be a family educator also put up material on the TC s for other parents to consult. Sometimes the advice is given for free, sometimes as a business. It is a business for Joshua Ginsberg. He puts a parents advice newsletter on the TC , usually monthly. Over 300 million people subscribe to it, nowadays at a 5-cent fee per person, or less. Here's an entry from the current newsletter:

"Now that TCs are universal and can access libraries of books, 3-d video, computer programs, you name it, it is clear that the tasks of both the Educator and the Communicator are far more stimulating that ten years ago.

One of my recent lessons with my ten-year-old daughter Julie was in art appreciation. In the standard art appreciation course the TC shows replicas of famous artists' pictures, and a computer asks the pupil to match the artist to the picture. Julie said to the computer that it would be fun to see Constable's Haywain as Picasso might have drawn it. The computer obliged with its interpretation , and then ten more stylised haywains appeared together with the question 'who might have drawn these?'. I believe we are the first to have prompted the TC along this road, but it may now become a standard question when the computer recognises a child with similar learning patterns to Julie's.

It is sometimes said that today's isolated sort of teaching has robbed children of the capacity to play and interact with other children. This is nonsense. We ensure that Julie and her four year old brother Pharon have lots of time to play with children in our neighbourhood . But in work we do prefer to interact with children who are of mutual advantage to Julie and to each other. The computer is an ace teacher, but so are people. You really learn things if you can teach them to someone else. Our computer has helped us to find a group of four including Julie with common interests, who each have expertise in some particular areas to teach the others.

The TC also makes it easier to play games within the family. My parents used to play draughts, halma, then chess with me. They used to try to be nice to me and let me win. This condescending kindness humiliated me, and I always worked frenetically to beat my younger brother (who therefore always lost and dissolved into tears.) Today Julie, Pharon and I play halma together against the graded computer, and Julie and I play it at chess. The computer knows Pharon's standard of play at halma and Julie's and mine at chess. Its default setting is at that level where each of us can win but only if we play at our best. Thus Pharon sometimes wins his halma game while Julie and I are simultaneously losing our chess game, and this rightly gives Pharon a feeling of achievement. When Julie and I have lost at chess, we usually ask the computer to re-rerun the game, stopping at out nmistakes and giving a commentary. As it is a friendly computer it does a marvelous job of consoling us. Last week it told Julie that the world champion actually once made the same mistake as she had done - would she like to see that game?

I intend to devote the next two letters to the subjects I have discussed here , but retailing the best of your suggestions instead of droning on with mine."

While the computer's role in children's education is mainly that of instructor (discovering a child's learning pattern and responding to it) and learning group matcher, its main role in higher education is as a store of knowledge. Although a computer can only know what Man has taught it, it has this huge advantage. No individual man lives or studies long enough to imbibe within himself all the skills and resources that are the product of the millennia of man's quest for knowledge, all the riches and details from man's inheritance of learning passed on from generation to generation. But any computer today can inherit and call up instantly any skill which exists anywhere in the form of a program.

This is why automatically updated databases are today the principal instruments of higher education and academic research. It is difficult for our generation to conceive that only forty years ago our scientists acted as tortoise-like discoverers of knowledge, confined to small and jealous cliques with random and restricted methods of communicating ideas. Down until the 1980s the world has several hundred sepaate cancer research organisations with no central co-ordinating database.

chapter 20x chapter 1

chapter 2

chapter 3 part 1 chapter 3 part 2

chapter 11 part 1 chapter 11 part 2

Norman Macrae

June 23 2010, 1:01am, The Times

follow the Ma: jack has spent since 1994 searching for where big-small chnage will come to chich markets - so fast moving consumer goods chnaged by ecommerce; finance and social sharing markets eg bikes by mobile apps-clouds; furniture by OTO; jobs education and happiness sectors by 1 refugee and bodrer crossings, 2 expereintial learning olympics and the games of education of youth as sustainability goals generation on every belt road map

Macrae: he was an elegant writer of original ideas who delighted in paradoxes

In a list of 20th-century British prophets without honour in their own land, the name of Norman Macrae would surely be in the top half dozen. The lack of recognition was particularly odd as Macrae was a journalist, a profession cluttered with self-promoting egos, and his subjects — economics, politics, technology and several more — were standard fare in pubs and Parliaments. There was hardly an aspect of life that was off-limits for him; through his writing he changed many minds and opened even more; most of his ideas were ahead of their time; and he was incapable of writing a dull sentence. And yet, in Britain at least, his achievements went largely unheralded.

The contrast was not lost on Macrae — his articles delighted in paradoxes of every kind — but it was easily explained. In 1949 he joined The Economist, then as now a publication without bylines, and did not leave it until he retired in 1988. Though he went on to write several books and a column in The Sunday Times, as well as becoming an enthusiastic blogger, his finest phrases and most original ideas appeared in The Economist. He was its deputy editor from 1965-88, and though he hoped to become editor he never let frustrated ambition stunt the enormous role he played in the publication’s success. When he joined the paper in 1949, its circulation was roughly 30,000, on a par with The Spectator and the New Statesman. By the time he left, its circulation had grown to more than 300,000, dwarfing the other two. It had indeed become, in Macrae’s words, the “world’s favourite viewspaper”.

Norman Macrae was born in 1923 and went to Mill Hill School in north London. In 1935 he moved with his parents to Moscow, where his father was British Consul. The memories of Stalin’s purges, and of Hitler’s pogroms during another paternal posting, fuelled Macrae’s passionate belief in freedom — just as his experience in the RAF, as a navigator in bombing raids over Germany, later turned him against the waste of war. In 1945 he went up to Corpus Christi, Cambridge, to read economics. He was not impressed (“Much of Cambridge’s intellectual atmosphere then was of subpolytechnic Marxism”), and it was only when he arrived at The Economist that all the pieces fell into place and his life really began.

Despite its anonymity, The Economist was the perfect pulpit for Macrae. It allowed him to roam, geographically as well as intellectually, and it gave him the time to explore big ideas, many of which appeared in the paper’s surveys — the only occasion when authors had a byline.

Perhaps the most remarkable was “Consider Japan” in 1962; long before Westerners realised there might be something to learn from that defeated and hidebound nation, Macrae predicted Japan would become the world’s greatest manufacturer. One reader wrote to the editor urging that, next time Macrae went travelling, he should take a hat with him so the sun wouldn’t addle his brain.

Macrae’s articles were full of such prescience. In 1973, when oil prices quadrupled, he wrote that they would collapse — which they did, just as spectacularly, two years later. When others were extolling the settled borders of the mixed economy in the 1960s and 1970s, he was predicting a global wave of privatisation. In 1983 he forecast the Berlin Wall would come down in Christmas 1989; he was out by just six weeks. He repeatedly disputed the CIA’s analysis of the size and strength of the Soviet economy, and was in due course proved right. And in 1984 he described not just the coming of the internet but also the effects it would have on how people would work and where:

“Eventually books, files, television programmes, computer information and telecommunications will merge ... There will be cheap terminals around everywhere ... [which] will be used to access databases anywhere in the world, and will become the brainworker’s mobile place of work.”

One of the abiding temptations of futurologists is to predict what they wish for, and Macrae sometimes did just that. He had a deep distrust of politicians and officialdom, so naturally favoured a small state. Hence his words, describing a book he wrote in 1984 called The 2024 Report: “The main event of 1990-2010 was that the world’s 60-year spasm of big government disappeared. We stopped letting politicians spend the absurd 45 per cent of GNP in countries like Britain ... and we all came down to more like the 10 per cent of GNP spent through government in America in 1929.”

That was one of Macrae’s blind spots. The other was most obvious in the 1970s, when he urged the Heath Government on to bigger and bigger fiscal deficits in pursuit of faster growth and lower unemployment. It was one of the few occasions where his thinking was behind events. It took him some years to shed such crude Keynesianism and come to accept that his supply-side crusades were the surer path to faster growth.

Macrae was the most generous of colleagues, a much loved figure who in private struggled to string words into a half coherent sentence — until he picked up his pen. He was also an effective public speaker who for years delighted American audiences with his unique mix of eccentricity and brilliance. He was honoured by the Japanese with the Order of the Rising Sun in 1988. Perhaps that finally stirred the men in Whitehall, as he was appointed CBE later that year.

Macrae had a long and happy marriage to Janet Kemp, who died in 1994. They had a son and a daughter, who died in 1989 when she was 34. It needed a man of great resilience to take such blows, but nobody who knew Macrae could ever doubt that his was indeed a big heart............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

Norman Macrae, CBE, journalist, was born on September 10, 1923. He died on June 11, 2010, aged 86

? -
Jun 11, 2010

(d.)

Bio/Description

A British economist, journalist and author, considered by some to have been one of the world's best forecasters when it came to economics and society. These forecasts mapped back to system designs mediated so that readers and entrepreneurial networks could exponentially calibrate shared alternative scenarios. He joined The Economist in 1949 and retired as its deputy chief editor in 1988. He foresaw the Pacific century, the reversal of nationalization of enterprises, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the spread of the internet, which were all published in the newspaper during his time there. Not to get bored, his first ten years in retirement produced the biography of Johnny Von Neumann (the mathematical father of computers and networks), a column for the UK Sunday Times, and a 'Heresy Column' for Fortune. He was the father of mathematician, marketing commentator, and author Chris Macrae. Their joint future history on death of distance in 1984 forecast that 2005-2015 would be humanity's most critical decade irreversibly impacting sustainability. In 1984, he wrote "The 2024 Report: a future history of the next 40 years". It was the first book to: provide readers with a brainstorming journey of what people in an internetworking world might do, and predict that a new economy would emerge with revolutionary new productivity and social benefits enjoyed by all who interacted in a net-connected world. In this book, he wrote: "Eventually books, files, television programmes, computer information and telecommunications will merge. We'll have this portable object which is a television screen with first a typewriter, later a voice activator attached. Afterwards it will be miniaturised so that your personal access instrument can be carried in your buttonhole, but there will be these cheap terminals around everywhere, more widely than telephones of 1984."
Y chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk :: rowp.tv :: linkedin UNwomens :: WASHINTGON DC TEXT HOTLIENE (USA=1) 240 316 8157

chapter 20x chapter 1

chapter 2

chapter 3 part 1 chapter 3 part 2

chapter 11 part 1 chapter 11 part 2

Attachments:

understandingentrepreneurialrevolution.doc, 229 KB Delete

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by chris macrae on October 19, 2018 at 6:51pm

13 tricky borders to sustainability- 7 no trumps

Over 40 years ago dad,The Economist's Norman Macrae, started debating how value will multiply between peoples in an era characterised by death of distance (satellite communications once installed don't make distance a primary cost of communicating the way it used to be)

This is one reason why smart valuation of borders interests me- not just neighbouring nations with land borders though those special opportunities- but if you face a coastal belt your borders may be very fluid and in worldwide space there are no borders – so welcome to our quiz and guided tour in 13 borders. Having said that China has about 15 land birders while the USA has tow. It seems interesting to compare sustainability intelligence of these two biggest marketing spaces. Do they understand what human needs their geographies could be valuable exemplars of assuming you agree : these are the most exciting times to be alive. Because all of us are determining whether our species thrives or goes the way of the dodo

0-2 China and half the world people (s asia) Women greatest innovations ever seen	0-1 China and far east leaders (half of shipped world trade) Open tech greatest innovations Ir4 ai age of navigating 100-4000 benchmark here as indeed benchmark deming -the hemisphere of super electronic and civile engineers -cf mit media lab archoitects bridge to new media archotects	0-2.1 China and Rest of south east Diversity’s cultural fusion -	0-3 China and half Eurasia’s Land Peoples of riussia have had a tough history -mainly with vast lads being invaded by others- how can we all elearn from this – sco brics
6-10 America and its southern border With only 2 boders -the united amerucans really need a longer term accommodation with their latin ftoend-s and by the way lating wil sonn be the main language	What if the only borders were 4 languages every child needed to be friends with – chiense English mother tongue coding – pity there is no L4 summit	12 What if the UNM3 behaved as if borders were sustainability’s greatest value in ending risks to mother earth	11 Arctic Circle – quite like;ly tehse countries wil detrain whether mother earh Can be saved from meltdown
Borders of South and central America	9 Borders of africa	5-4 EU and its landed neighbors	8Med sea
T7 he old roads crossroads – mid east

Numbers above refer to our usual BRI.school mapping

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by chris macrae on July 2, 2019 at 5:52am

britain needs to try hardest on mapping win-win trade routes now that we start with a clean sheet fromthe eu albatross- 3 cheers for odi

China and global development: what to read ahead of the Belt and Road Forum

16 April 2019

Insight

Opening of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in Beijing, China, 2017. Photo: Russian Presidential Press and Information Office CC BY 4.0

The second Belt and Road Forum in Beijing later this month is shaping up to be a major event. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is not explicitly about development, but it will have important implications for many low- and middle-income countries. This blog features my recommended resources for anyone wanting to better understand the BRI.

What is the Belt and Road?

It’s a massive infrastructure and connectivity initiative of the Chinese government, loosely based on two main routes: the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road. In Chinese the initiative is called 一带一路 (literally, ‘one belt one road’). The English name has changed from One Belt One Road (or OBOR) to the now widely accepted BRI.

The name is not the only moving piece. The BRI is fluid – an ever-evolving concept that has changed considerably since it was first announced in 2013. While large investment projects characterised the initial phase, it now focuses on high-quality development, mirroring China’s growth path from ‘high-speed’ to ‘high-quality’.

The very nature of BRI has also evolved as well. It started as a China-driven plan to connect the Eurasian region, but the Chinese government now aims to make this a ‘platform’, open for all countries to join, and for all interested investors to collaborate.

One challenge that many non-Chinese observers (especially in Europe and in the US) struggle with is the ‘vagueness’ of the BRI concept. The BRI brand is broad enough to encompass many projects and ideas. While this makes the BRI flexible to evolve, it also makes it difficult to pinpoint its exact scope. What makes an infrastructure project a BRI project? And does it matter to be able to define it? To avoid potential misuse of the term, the Chinese government is moving toward developing a BRI project database (more on this below).

Top resources on the Belt and Road Initiative

The starting point for anyone interested in the BRI should be the official Belt and Road portal. The portal provides lots of useful documents, including a list of countries that have signed cooperation documents with China, and the ‘Guiding principles on financing the development of the Belt and Road’, signed by almost 30 countries in 2017 to promote more sustainable financing of BRI projects.

The ‘Vision and Actions on Jointly Building Silk Road Economic Belt and... is the official blueprint for the BRI. It highlights the five main areas of the initiative: policy cooperation, infrastructure connectivity, trade connectivity, financial cooperation and people-to-people exchanges.

While currently there is no official BRI project database, the Chinese government is developing one. However, there are several unofficial databases with different focus areas. The Merics BRI tracker looks specifically at BRI projects. Aiddata collects and distributes data on Chinese official finance. The Reconnecting Asia database lists major infrastructure investment in Asia. The American Enterprise Institute database includes announced Chinese outward investment.

The domestic side of the Belt and Road Initiative

The BRI is about China ‘going out’ (pdf), and as such it responds first and foremost to China’s domestic needs. A few resources published last year make this case convincingly.

This article looks at how the BRI helps China deal with a number of domestic challenges, including structural changes in the economy, shifting demographics, financial risk management, and poverty alleviation.

Other resources look at how the BRI is managed domestically. This article offers interesting insights around the domestic policy processes governing the initiative. Very interesting and quite critical of many aspects of the BRI is this article, which looks not only at how the BRI is managed and directed domestically, but also how it serves domestic policy needs, including mobilising provinces, and how dissent and disagreement around policy choices are controlled.

Criticism at home, criticism abroad

The Belt and Road is not uncontroversial. Most of the criticism aired outside of China refers to the financial sustainability of many Belt and Road projects, discussed in an earlier round-up. I also flag the paper ‘Examining the debt implications of the Belt and Road Initiative fr..., and this recent piece by Deborah Brautigam challenging the simple ‘debt-trap diplomacy’ narrative and assessing some of the financial challenges around the BRI.

Criticism around BRI is also raised domestically. Some commentators point to the lack of planning, or inappropriate framing of the initiative. Others criticise the fact that the Chinese government is spending (or lending) abroad, when a lot of people still live below the poverty line. This narrative may sound all too familiar to audiences from OECD countries.

The Belt and Road Initiative’s impact on partner countries

I also find it very interesting to read about the impact of BRI in specific countries. While some countries (such as Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Pakistan) have received extensive media attention, there are less obvious but equally interesting stories.

One blog, for example, highlights the emerging impact of the BRI on urban development in Uganda. A piece on Myanmar discusses how the government is trying to manage BRI projects, scrutinising not only their price tag, but also how they fit into Myanmar’s development strategy. Another report looks at the ‘Balkan Silk Road’ running through Western Europe.

I have also been revisiting a lot of older resources to better understand the implications of the BRI for development. UNDP China has a lot of content about BRI and development, which is worth exploring – see, for example, this report on economic development along the Belt and Road.

If you would like to sign up to receive the China resources round-up in your inbox, please email me at l.calabrese@odi.org

▶ Reply

Atlanta.
Paris
Turkey.
Dhaka.
Austria
Boston
Brussels	Poland
China
Switzerland
Princeton-Nashville
London-Glasgow	Nordica: S D N

Canada
Austin
Spain	.Kenya
Brazil	Joburg
Oregon/CA
Germany
.S.Africa
.India

Norman Macrae : Books & Surveys at The Economist

partnering 7 billion peoples' S-goals-Goal 17

Program

chapter 20x chapter 1

Norman Macrae

Bio/Description

Replies to This Discussion

chapter 20x chapter 1

Norman Macrae

Bio/Description

China and global development: what to read ahead of the Belt and Road Forum

What is the Belt and Road?

Top resources on the Belt and Road Initiative

The domestic side of the Belt and Road Initiative

Criticism at home, criticism abroad

The Belt and Road Initiative’s impact on partner countries

About

BRI.school ENTREPRENEURIAL REVOLUTION NETWORK BENCHMARKS 2025now : Remembering Norman Macrae

TOP 12 TO SAVE WORLD FROM The Economist's 42 YEAR ENTREPRENEURIAL REVOLUTION SEARCH

Number 1 in Economics for Youth