A Study on the Evaluation of the Public Health Governance in Countries along the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)

Abstract

Social resilience for public health is a new theoretical framework for understanding public health risk governance capacity. This study identifies 18 indicators from the publicly available database and adopts the method of multivariable analysis to evaluate the level of social resilience for public health in 73 countries along the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The study finds that the main influencing factors of social resilience for public health are institutional resilience, physical resilience, and participation resilience. The capacity of public health risk governance in countries along the BRI is classified into three levels: high, medium, and low. A high level of public health risk governance capacity is mainly shown in developed European countries such as Italy, rich Southwestern Asian countries such as the United Arab Emirates, and East Asian countries represented by Japan, South Korea, and Singapore. The middle-level countries are mainly distributed at the junction of Eurasia, which Russia represents. The low-level countries are primarily distributed in South Asia, Africa, and the war zones. In general, countries along the BRI have polarized the capacity of public health risk governance and structural inequalities, mainly manifested in large differences in the organizational capacity and mobilization capacity between countries in response to public health risk events, and the gap between the rich and the poor within a country. Under such circumstances, the building of a Community of Common Health is required to be accelerated.

Belt and road initiative as a gender equalizer: Decomposing the impact of belt and road initiative trade on gender wages gap in participating countries

“…For instance, some propose that the BRI's emphasis on historically male-dominated industries like manufacturing and construction could further marginalize women in the workforce (Himaz, 2021;Chittaphone, 2023). Furthermore, discrimination and cultural norms in the participating nations may cause women to be treated differently in terms of pay and job opportunities (Zhang, C., & Wang 2022). The BRI has sparked considerable interest because it involves massive infrastructure investments and aims at promoting growth and development in the economy in participating countries (Wang et al 2023).…”