“The claim of debt trap is not borne out by any data. It’s not borne out by any actions, either”, said David Ferguson, Scottish writer and honorary chief English editor of Foreign Languages Press, China in an interview with China Economic Net.
“China has a long history of forgiving debt from the poorest countries and island countries. And there is no country in which the Belt and Road debt is the highest part of the national debt.
For the most part, debt to China forms a relatively small part of any country’s external debt. They have a far greater level of debt to the World Bank and private lenders, mostly western ones”, he added. In Pakistan, nearly half of its external debt comes from multilateral institutions.
In Tanzania, the majority of its external debt is multilateral creditor. “Infrastructure is the first key to economic developments. You have to have that before you can do anything else. And that is what the Belt and Road Initiative is actually delivering”, he says, adding, “sometimes it doesn’t matter what it is or what it does. People are just going to seek criticism and make accusations”.
