A new road to an inaccessible land

Re:A new road to an inaccessible land by dmitriid on Saturday July 03, 2021 @04:58AM (#27720301)

That's what China is doing: they invest in infrastructure in many countries, and this solves significantly more problems and ties countries to China more deeply than the current vicious circle that Western countries employ: give out large grants and credits to largely corrupt governments, that money gets mostly stolen, give more money (and also more money to cover the interest rates from previous credits), repeat.

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Re:A new road to an inaccessible land by inglor_cz on Saturday July 03, 2021 @06:52AM (#27720711)

Chinese investments into infrastructure are hardly corruption-free. Look at the case of the new port in Sri Lanka, which was a fairly obvious debt trap from the beginning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hambantota_International_Port

Or at the highway in Montenegro, a small and poorish Balkan country that cannot really afford a $1 bn project going through the worst mountainous terrain in Europe.

https://www.npr.org/2021/06/28/1010832606/road-deal-with-chi...

This kind of bad investments tend to be signed by corrupt politicians and sometimes backfire spectacularly.

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Re:A new road to an inaccessible land by dnautics on Saturday July 03, 2021 @10:47AM (#27721933)

did you not read the article? It is the best road in montenegro.

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Re:A new road to an inaccessible land by inglor_cz on Saturday July 03, 2021 @11:39AM (#27722331)

I can buy a Porsche and have the best car in my neighbourhood, but does it make sense if I go broke from the purchase?

Same with Montenegro. The road does not make economic sense, either for Montenegro itself, or for a connection between Belgrade and Bar. The demand that would justify building and maintenance of such a behemoth in the wildest Balkan mountains just isn't there.

If the region was flat, there would have been a (much cheaper) highway a long time ago, but it isn't. It is an engineering hell, much like most construction tasks in the mountains.

Heck, even California dropped its plans for a bullet train from SF to LA because it was too expensive to cross the mountain ranges that stand in the way. And California is orders of magnitude richer than Montenegro.

Mountains are best avoided when building roads. If you absolutely can't, the viability of the project needs a long, hard look.

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Re:A new road to an inaccessible land by dnautics on Saturday July 03, 2021 @11:49AM (#27722429)

Should have put more emphasis on the word "best"

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Re:A new road to an inaccessible land by yorwba on Saturday July 03, 2021 @05:47AM (#27720479)

China's development finance has had plenty of the same problems, which is why loan volume has drastically dropped since the 2016 peak [1], China adopted debt sustainability criteria similar to those used by World Bank and IMF [2] and the chairman of China Development Bank was relieved of his post and arrested for corruption [3].

[1] https://www.bu.edu/gdp/2020/12/13/scope-and-findings-chinas-...

[2] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3007714/ch...

[3] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-bank-idUSKBN2070PA

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Re:A new road to an inaccessible land by Bishizel on Saturday July 03, 2021 @11:06PM (#27726940)

They also do it via loans, so instead of paying aide every year, they just hold loans over their heads to get those countries to fall in line.

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