ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Mar. Sci.
Sec. Marine Affairs and Policy
This article is part of the Research TopicSmartization and Resilience of Ports and ShippingView all 10 articles
Trade and Port-based Resilience Analysis under the Expansion of the Belt and Road Trade Agreement: An Integrated Economic and Environmental Assessment
Provisionally accepted
- 1Shanghai Maritime University School of Economics and Management, Shanghai, China
- 2Shanghai Institute for Science of Science, Shanghai, China
- 3Institute of Logistics Science and Engineering, Shanghai Maritime University, Shanghai, China
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Trade cooperation represents a fundamental and crucial element within the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative. This paper selects representative countries with Belt and Road trade agreement that are under negotiation, under study, and accessible. Employing the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) model, the study simulates seven distinct scenarios for the expansion of these trade agreements, analyzes the economic benefits under different scenarios, and constructs a multi-region input–output table. A Global Trade Analysis Project-Multi Region Input Output (GTAP-MRIO) model is extended to capture carbon flows from maritime trade and port-related logistics sectors. We obtain several findings. Regarding economic benefits, the expansion of the Belt and Road trade agreement can improve China's terms of trade, increase the scale of China's total output and total imports, increase GDP growth, and increase social welfare. Regarding industrial output, the output of technology-intensive industries is likely to increase, and the output of energy-intensive industries is predicted to increase significantly. The transfer of carbon emissions from China to other countries is predicted to decrease, and the transfer of carbon emissions from China's exports comes mainly from energy-intensive industries. These predictions based on model analysis offer theoretical guidance and policy recommendations for the pursuit of green and high-quality sustainable development within the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative.
Keywords: "Belt and Road"3, carbon emissions1, Global Trade AnalysisProject (GTAP)4, Regional Economic Integration5, Sustainability2
Received: 04 Nov 2025; Accepted: 17 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Mi, Rui, Zhu, Ge and Chen. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Jingfeng Ge
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