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This empirical study has examined the impact of Chinese investments, namely infrastructure, energy, services, other investment sectors, and trade openness on the economies of the 25 Asian and North African countries along with the Belt and Road (B&R) Initiative for a period of 2007 to 2016 using the Johansen Fisher Panel Cointegration Test, Panel Dynamic Ordinary Least Squares (PDOLS) model, and the Toda and Yamamoto technique for testing causality. The findings revealed cointegration among the variables and that the impact of Chinese investments on economic growth in the host countries is positive, but it has a weaker effect, to a certain extent, in all sectors of the host countries while trade openness positively impacts the countries. Furthermore, there is evidence of a unidirectional causality between some FDI (foreign direct investment) economies while the investment in services and other sectors does not cause economic growth in the host countries. Based on the results, the paper proposes that the host countries increase the FDI in the sector of infrastructure, energy, and technology to enhance their economies.

Regional competition may play an important role in the balance of environmental protection and economic growth. However, it is a pending issue of whether the competition among Chinese local governments leads to a race to black development or green development. This paper aims to explore the strategic interactions in provincial development in terms of an environment-economic indicator, i.e., the pollution intensity in China from 2000 to 2013. We divide four predominant industrial pollutants into two groups according to whether the pollutant is regulated, and then test the strategic interactions among regions based on the spatial lag term by employing the spatial Durbin model. The results show that the heterogeneous factors, such as various pollutants and regional difference, may give rise to diversified competition strategies. We find that the "race to black development" hypothesis is not supported at the national level, and the "race to green development" hypothesis is established in the developed eastern regions only in terms of the regulated industrial pollutants. We also detect how pollution intensity is influenced by the direct and spatial spillover effects of environmental regulation and find that environmental legislation has been effective in reducing regulated pollutants' pollution intensity, while the effects of environmental staff and investment are weak. Finally, some policy suggestions are discussed.

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