Book Series

A GEOPOLITICAL ASSESSMENT OF THE BELT AND ROAD INITIATIVE

On May 2-3, 2019, the Oriental Business and Innovation Center (OBIC) successfully organized its third OBIC Conference titled "The V4 in East Asia and East Asia in the V4: Present Economic and Political Relations between the Visegrad Four Countries and East Asia". One of the most frequently debated topics of the conference was the Belt and Road Initiative launched by China in 2013. The project has been hailed in several developing and emerging countries as a next step in the globalization process, whereas it has also been framed ambiguously and increasingly cautiously in the West. As of March 2020, 138 countries signed a Memorandum of Understanding with China and joined the Initiative.

Since the project started, the volume of scientific articles around this topic has become astounding. This edited collection contains several papers of assessments of the Belt and Road Initiative, which were presented at the OBIC Conference 2019, and in some cases they (even their main topics) underwent significant changes.

This collected volume is part of the OBIC Book Series, where eight books have been published until now. These collected books cover several topics ranging from economic development strategies to concentrated works focusing on a single country. The present book centers on the critical and geopolitical assessments of the Belt and Road Initiative. The emphasis is put on both political and economic factors of the project. The authors whose research is presented in this volume are from different countries, such as Australia, Poland, Serbia, and Colombia guaranteeing a wide scale of opinions and approaches on the Belt and Road Initiative.

We are truly thankful for the support provided by the Magyar Nemzeti Bank (MNB) and the Budapest Business School, without their generosity and commitment to cooperation, this volume would not have been possible.

Online available form of the book: