The paper argues that East Asia is setting the pace for the recent trend in regional and inter-regional integration, which is associated with multilateral infrastructure connectivity initiatives, like the "Belt and Road Initiative" (BRI) of the People's Republic of China and Japan's "Partnership...

The paper deals with the issue of how Japan is positioning itself in the emerging and contested field of international connectivity initiatives. It starts with surveying the emergence of the connectivity topic in recent years, paying attention to recent infrastructure initiatives in the...

This paper presents a structural general equilibrium model to analyze the effects on trade, welfare, and gross domestic product of common transport infrastructure. Specifically, the model builds on the framework by Caliendo and Parro (2015)-a Ricardian model with sectoral linkages, trade in...

This paper studies the impact of transport infrastructure projects of the Belt and Road Initiative on shipment times and trade costs. Based on a new data on completed and planned Belt and Road transport projects, Geographic Information System analysis is used to estimate shipment times before...

The question to what extent the EU, Germany, its regional states or individual localities can and should cooperate with China has gained considerable importance recently. This paper discusses the city of Duisburg, an important logistics hub in western Germany, next to the rivers Rhine and Ruhr,...