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α: calibrated so average coauthorship-adjusted count equals average raw count
The Chinese-led Belt and Road Initiative has created unprecedented economic opportunities for developing and underdeveloped countries to became more active in international trade, including in energy exports. The dynamics overlap with a worrying trend in democratic governance and accountability in these same countries, raising policy challenges for their long-term development prospects. By adopting a system approach within a panel dataset, we estimate this policy trade-off and reveal the heterogeneity dimension of these effects for a large set of countries and across a number of economic sectors linked to energy exports. Finally, we discuss some policy implications of our results.