Level of socio-economic development of Silk Road Initiative countries. Taxonomic Approach

Abstract

The Chinese economy, after the reforms in the late 70s and early 80s of the twentieth century, including the opening of the economy to international trade and foreign direct investment, became in the last 40 years the world s largest economy, with undisguised ambitions to change the global status quo in terms of control of strategic flows and supply chains. Reactivation of the historic Silk Road is seen as a vehicle to achieve such a geopolitical ambition. The aim of this paper is to study and compare the socio-economic development of countries belonging to the New Silk Road project. The study covers the period from 2004 to 2018. Evaluation of the countries is provided by constructed socio-economic taxonomic measures, which are used to cluster countries into homogenous classes, with particular emphasis on the position of China in these comparisons, and to distinguish potential directions of the investment. Provided research shows that countries belonging to the New Silk Road are very diverse. We may distinguish regions of better and worse level of socio-economic development which is consistent with the generally accepted knowledge. However, we also obtained some unexpected results. China, which was classified as a country with average level of development (in all but one years) made a great progress in the analyzed period.