A Chinese clout on energy exports some countries cannot shake off

The Chinese-led Belt and Road Initiative has created unprecedented economic opportunities for developing and underdeveloped countries that became more active in international trade, including in energy exports. The dynamics overlap with a worrying trend in democratic governance and accountability in these same countries, raising policy challenges for their long-term development prospects. By adopting a system approach within a panel dataset, we estimate this policy trade-off and reveal the heterogeneity dimension of these effects for a large set of countries and across a number of economic sectors linked to energy exports. Finally, we discuss some policy implications of our results.