The BRI does not aim at strengthening only one route, but it envisages six economic corridors with overland and maritime elements, consisting in networks of rail routes, roads, waterways, pipelines, and ICT infrastructure ( Das 2017) these corridors are: (1) the China–Mongolia–Russia Economic Corridor (2) the New Eurasian Land Bridge (3) the China–Central Asia–West Asia Economic Corridor (4) the China–Indochina Peninsula Economic Corridor (5) the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and (6) the Bangladesh–China–India–Myanmar Economic Corridor. The former connects China to Central and South Asia and onward to Europe the latter connects China to the nations of South East Asia, the Gulf countries, East and North Africa, and Europe. The BRI encompasses two main projects: the Silk Road Economic Belt (SREB) and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road (MSR). The idea behind the program was that of a “win–win cooperation that promotes shared development and prosperity” 1 and favors integration and cultural exchange among regions. In 2015, China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) of the Ministry of Commerce and Ministry of Foreign Affairs defined frameworks, principles, and actions of the initiative by releasing the Blueprint ‘Vision and Actions on Jointly Building the Silk Road Economic Belt and 21st Century Maritime Silk Road’. In 2013, the Chinese government announced the launch of a new project known as ‘The Belt and Road Initiative’ (BRI) to improve connectivity between Asia, Europe, and Africa. Our results indicate that bilateral preferences among BRI countries will intensify inasmuch as they succeed in coordinating their infrastructural projects. We then study the possible impact of an improvement in infrastructure on a ‘gravity-adjusted’ measure of trade preferences, given by the residuals of our first estimations. Such methodology allows us to estimate bilateral trade intensity without resorting to the traditional “size” variables of the gravity model, taking the entire network of multilateral trade into account. Our empirical strategy relies on a particular specification of the gravity model, in which the dependent variable consists in an index of revealed trade preferences, calculated by comparing the actual value of trade flows between two countries with their expected value, proportional to the two countries’ total trade. We carry out our analysis considering countries participating in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a project specifically designed to promote infrastructural connectivity and therefore boost trade among the countries involved. This paper aims at investigating whether and how the intensity of trade between a pair of countries changes when they experience improvements in their infrastructural systems.

Cepii geodist variables