Cross-Sectoral Inter-Country Linkages under the Belt and Road Initiative: Chinese ICT Services Value Added Inflows to Manufacturing Exports in the New Eurasian Land Bridge Economies

The article presents the New Eurasian Land Bridge (NELB) of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and China, with a special focus on the role of these countries in global value chains (GVCs), to investigate the intensification of the Chinese ICT services’ value-added inflows to the NELB countries’ manufacturing, especially to transport equipment and computers, electronic and electrical equipment. The central question is how strong the linkages between the Chinese ICT services and the selected NELB countries’ manufacturing are. We hypothesized that: (1) As a result of the introduction of the BRI, the role of the Chinese ICT services’ value-added diverted to the NELB countries’ manufacturing gross exports increased; (2) The growth rate of the Chinese ICT services’ value-added directed to the NELB manufacturing gross exports exceeds the growth rate of the non-services’ value-added diverted to their manufacturing; (3) The NELB economies became more dependent on the Chinese ICT services’ value-added embodied in their manufacturing gross exports.