【英文】全球发展政策中心报告：中国海外投资进入“小而美”时代（42页）

One factor behind the decline in Chinese overseas development fnance is its own changing supply  of foreign currency. As Dreher et al (2021) fnd, Chinese fnance was directly correlated with China’s  current account surplus through 2017; incoming foreign currency can be leveraged more actively  through direct sovereign fnance than through accumulating foreign reserves. Figure 2 shows Chinese overseas development fnance commitments and current account surplus from 2008-2021.  The two are clearly correlated from 2009 through the decline in lending in 2018, but the relationship  does not hold for the most recent years. In 2021, China’s current account surplus rebounded to levels  not seen since 2015. While China’s current account is just one of many factors determining China’s  incentives for continued overseas development fnancing, the rebound indicates the potential for  future expansion.

However, while China has shifted away from its most ambitious years of development fnance, it has  continued to lend in more measured and targeted ways, increasingly adopting a framework of “smart  and small” or “small is beautiful,” prioritizing high-quality, targeted support over large-scale general  support (see, for example, Lawrence 2022; MOFCOM 2022; Nyabiage 2022).  Table 1 shows the average commitment amount, length (for linear projects such as railways, pipelines and power transmission networks) and area (for area-based projects such as reservoirs and  mines) for three time periods. The frst period includes lending before 2013, the year that China  announced the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The second period includes the frst fve years of the  BRI and shows a signifcant increase in the average size of loans, both in value and in the geographic  scale of supported projects. In the most recent four years, however, loans have returned to their  previous average level of value and length and fallen even more for the size of area-based projects. It  should be noted, however, that the average area value may rise from 16 square kilometers in coming  years, as planned and recently built reservoirs are flled for projects such as Laos’ Nam Tha 1 Hydropower Plant.