Ray Publishes Article in Asia Dialogue on Chinese Development Finance in LAC

Rebecca Ray, a postdoctoral fellow at the Global Development Policy Center, wrote a recent article about how the growth of China as a source of development finance for Latin America has changed the landscape and social governance of major development projects in the region. The article, entitled, “Chinese development finance and the Andean Amazonian infrastructure boom,” was published in the Asia Dialogue, the online magazine of University of Nottingham Asia Research Institute, on November 1, 2018.

From the text of the article:

Diplomatic ties may be fraying between the US and China, but the United States’ traditional economic partners in Latin America are growing closer to the Asian giant, particularly as regards infrastructure finance. Seven Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries have joined the Belt and Road Initiative and six have applied to join the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. This burgeoning relationship brings major opportunities to LAC, but it circumvents the traditional environmental and social safeguards of western development finance institutions (DFIs), potentially bringing important risks to ecosystems and communities in the region.

This article comes just after the GDP Center released a new series of case studies and statistical analyses examining Chinese development finance in the Andean Amazon. These are part of of a multi-year, interdisciplinary study, entitled, “Standardizing Sustainable Development? Development Banks in the Andean Amazon,”carried out by economists, political scientists, ecologists, geographers, and engineers from Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center, Universidad del Pacífico in Lima, Peru; Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales in Quito, Ecuador; and Instituto de Estudios Avanzados en Desarrollo in La Paz, Bolivia.

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Rebecca Ray is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the GDP Center’s Global Economic Governance Initiative. She holds a PhD in economics from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and an MA in international development from the Elliott School of International Affairs at the George Washington University. Since 2013, she has focused her GEGI research on Latin America, including the annual China-Latin America Economic Bulletin series, the book project China and Sustainable Development in Latin America: the Social and Environmental Dimension, and her current project, Safeguarding Sustainable Development in the Andean Amazon.