China and west should co-operate on emerging market debt

For at least a couple of years, it has been clear that the wheels are coming off China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the $838bn programme launched by Beijing in 2013 to build infrastructure in about 160 mostly developing countries. Yet as Beijing seeks to contain the fallout from stalled projects and non-performing loans, it risks complicating matters with a surge in “emergency lending”.

New data from AidData, a US-based research…