Since the signing of the agreement on the pairing of the Eurasian economic Union and the Economic belt of the silk road passed exactly year. But large-scale political and economic project, I was pushed to the alternate path, the difficulties in its implementation becomes more and more.
The idea is that the new silk road project needs to connect the European and Chinese markets, resulting in the delivery of goods from Central China to the EU will be reduced to two weeks, which is at least twice faster than the supply through the Suez canal. In this project, the EEU countries have the opportunity to solve their problems with infrastructure at the expense of investment inflows in China. And it’s not just about highways, but also on the construction of enterprises and other economic projects.
But literally at the first stage, the project stalled. “While some significant phenomena and events in the framework of the project pairing is not observed. There are different kinds of thoughts, how to do it all. But countries have different plans, they were drawn up on the basis of different concepts and development strategies of individual regions” – says “the Economy today” the head of the Center for post-Soviet studies of the Institute of Economics Leonid Vardomsky.
Plus common projects were laid out before all these financial difficulties. “Now free no money, but any project is primarily investment. Specific projects are also still not announced. And when two main objectives, the project slows down. It is this deep reflection phase has the place now. Apparently all cleared up sooner or later in terms of dynamics and financial resources, and ideas immediately arise, but in the conditions of economy to talk about any costly infrastructure projects is quite difficult,” continues vardomskiy.
In his opinion, silk road is a very expensive infrastructure project with a long payback period, and we have now the trend to implement more medium and small projects in high return in a year or three. But when the return is calculated for decades, there are questions that the experts are looking for answers now.
With a colleague agrees, and head of the sector of the economy and politics of China Sergey Lukonin. Among the difficulties of the pairing, he also highlighted the lack of real projects. But at the same time, in his opinion, we cannot say that the blame for the heavy promotion of projects lies entirely on Russia. “The Chinese side this project is also not particularly elaborate, specific starting points, by which it was possible that any measure, no”, – says the expert.
Lukonin has allocated the only project in the framework of the silk road, investments in the project “Yamal LNG”, which envisages the construction of an LNG plant with a capacity of 16.5 million tonnes on the basis of the South Tambeyskoye field. Literally at the end of April in the framework of the joint project of the Chinese company has been launched another project – the production of refrigerators in Tatarstan. Here is an ellipsis.
It is possible that the fog around this project will begin to dissipate by the visit of the President of Russia Vladimir Putin to China. As stated by foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, currently being finalized collective position paper of all the countries of the EEU, which will form the basis of the consultation process of the parties.
