Low Wage Demographics Are Driving Chinese FDI Along The
Belt & Road
One of the less understood aspects of China's Belt &
Road Initiative is China's need to secure cheap labor resources
to boost both its domestic economy as well as provide Chinese
manufactured, overseas produced export products.
The reason for this is that manufacturing in China has, over the
years, become progressively more expensive. This graph, courtesy of
Trading
Economics illustrates this over the course of the past ten
years:
Pic 1
While much is made of China's project financing and
infrastructure build along many of the nations it has signed Belt
& Road MoU with, a lesser known aspect is the Chinese need to
use emerging economies to provide cheaper labor resources than
China itself can now provide. To this end, China has quietly been
establishing Chinese owned, or Chinese joint-ventured Industrial
Parks and Economic Zones across the Belt & Road Initiative. I
outlined these in the
