Does the Belt and Road Initiative Promote Entrepreneurship in Participating Countries?

Abstract

In the context of global economic restructuring and the rise of emerging markets, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a key international economic cooperation platform led by China, has not only reshaped regional economic ties but also provided external opportunities for the restructuring of entrepreneurial ecosystems in countries along the route. Based on data from 22 co-built countries and 15 non-co-built countries from 2010 to 2019, this paper considers the Belt and Road Initiative as a quasi-natural experiment and constructs a staggered difference-in-differences framework to identify the path of the initiative’s impact on entrepreneurial activities. The empirical results show that the initiative significantly increases the entrepreneurial participation rate in participating countries, and the policy effect is more significant in developing countries, countries with low capital openness, as well as in Asia and Africa. Mechanism tests further find that digital infrastructure development and total factor productivity enhancement play a mediating role in the path of policy impact on entrepreneurial activities, suggesting that the initiative effectively stimulates entrepreneurial behavioral responses at the national level by improving the institutional environment and resource allocation conditions. This paper theoretically expands the research on the behavioral mechanism of the economic effects of BRI and empirically reveals how external institutional policies promote entrepreneurial activity through ecological improvement and efficiency enhancement. In terms of policy recommendations, entrepreneurship development should be incorporated into the key agenda of the “Belt and Road” cooperation framework, promote the cross-border collaborative construction of digital infrastructure, and strengthen the institutional supply and entrepreneurship support system, to further stimulate the entrepreneurial potential of developing regions.