China's "Belt and Road Initiative" (BRI) includes major infrastructure investment projects - roads, ports, railways - that aim to improve connectivity along a number of transport corridors spanning 71 countries. In this paper we find that notwithstanding the large scale of the initiative,...

China has used two main spatial policies to shape its geographic patterns of development: restricted labor mobility through the Hukou residential registration system and massive infrastructure investment, notably a 96,000 kilometer national expressway network. This paper develops a structural...