PROPOSED by China in 2013, "One Belt One Road", now renamed the "Belt and Road Initiative" (BRI), is a global economic plan to create regional connectivity through infrastructure development and promote world trade and economic growth. It plans to connect 65 countries across Asia, and the Middle East to Europe by land along the historic Silk Route and another maritime route, down the Pacific and Indian Ocean and up the Mediterranean Sea. It is arguably the most ambitious economic project in the 21st century in terms of physical and economic scale and geographic spread.

The 65 countries make up 65 per cent of the world population, one third of the world's GDP (gross domestic product), 40 per cent of global trade and one quarter of all goods and services the world moves.

In September last year, I mentioned at a conference that, amid the then pessimistic world economic outlook, there were only two possible major stimuli or drivers that could reignite global growth, namely the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the One Belt One Road (OBOR) programme. The TPP is now as good as dead, although there have been recent attempts to revive it. The world is now left with BRI as the only potential global collaborative vision that can be the engine of the world's economic growth. This BRI programme is sometimes likened to the US' Marshall Plan, except that the BRI is 12 times larger.