On December 28th, Fudan Institute of Belt and Road and Global Governance workshop was held in 209 of Think Tank Building. Zhang Anqi made a report titled "One Belt One Road" Initiatives and related countries’ livelihood improvements".

A systematic and standardized study of the impact of BRI on inequality or poverty in the countries along the route of BRI is of great significance for advancing BRI, building a community with a shared future for mankind, and telling Chinese stories to enhance China’s international discourse power, but related research is almost blank. From the perspective of development economics, her report uses WIID and PWT data to estimate poverty line indicators based on the Gini coefficient and average income of countries of BRI, and then uses Differences-in-Differences (DID) settings to show the impact of BRI on the current poverty rates of different poverty lines. The preliminary results obtained show that the BRI has a better poverty reduction effect on the higher poverty line ($3.2) than on the lower poverty line ($1.9). In view of the large differences in social and economic conditions in different regions or countries, the analysis of the mechanism of BRI's poverty reduction uses the Theil index to break down inequality and separate the weight of the impact of different domestic and foreign influencing factors on poverty reduction. Then conduct a special analysis of the mechanism of action of the countries of BRI. In the discussion after the report, everyone also asked questions about such as the difference between immediate and long-term effects, how to add social and cultural factors like religious culture and Covid-19 epidemic into quantitative and qualitative analysis.

(Zhang Anqi, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of BRI and Global Governance at Fudan University.)