Overseas economic interest perspective in foreign policy—a case study of China

Abstract

We argue that overseas economic interests and traditional non-economic aspects such as political sovereignty and territorial integrity constitute important parts of a country’s integrative national security set. To enable a better understanding of the overseas economic dimension of a country’s foreign policy rationale, we develop an analytic framework inspired by the Multi-Objective Optimisation by Ratio Analysis approach (Multi-MOORA), which quantifies a country’s overseas economic interests adjusted by country-specific risk factors. Using China as an example, aided by a dataset covering 172 countries with economic ties with China spanning a period from 2013 to 2017, we show that its foreign policy focus in developing countries since the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) motivated by geopolitical and ideological considerations as well as significant economic interest. Protection of these overseas economic interests is imperative to establish an advantage over Western firms which presently avoid many of the countries in question.

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank the funding from UIBE (project number: TS4-09).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

We would like to thank the editor of the journal and three anonymous referees, whose comments and revision suggestions have greatly improved this paper.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Increasing the value of weights is equivalent to reducing the weight of indicator variables, because the exponential function in formula (2) is a decreasing function of weighted variables.

Additional information

Funding

UIBE research funding for overseas investment protection.