Belt and Road Initiative provides financing platforms for cooperation

BEIJING - Development and policy-oriented financing has revved up support for the Belt and Road development in the past years, with a rapid expansion of multilateral and bilateral financial and investment platforms.

Since opening in 2016, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), a multilateral development bank headquartered in Beijing, has become one of the key multilateral platforms for building the Belt and Road, along with other multilateral development banks, and has won broad trust and recognition from the international community.

The membership of AIIB had grown from the 57 founding members to 93, spread across five continents at the end of 2018. It had approved loans of $7.5 billion and leveraged other investments totaling almost $40 billion. Its 35 approved projects are distributed over 13 countries including Indonesia, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Oman, Turkey and Egypt.

As of the end of 2018, the contracted investment under the Silk Road Fund had reached about $11 billion, with actual investment adding up to $7.7 billion.