David Dollar is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s John L. Thornton China Center. He is a leading expert on China's economy and US-China economic relations. From 2009 to 2013 he was the US Treasury's economic and financial emissary to China. Prior to that, Dollar worked at the World Bank, and from 2004 to 2009 was country director for China and Mongolia. His other World Bank assignments primarily focused on Asian economies, including South Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Bangladesh and India. From 1995 to 2004, Dollar worked in the World Bank’s research department, publishing articles on globalisation, growth and inequality. Prior to his World Bank career, Dollar was an assistant professor of economics at University of California, Los Angeles, spending a semester in Beijing teaching at the Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He has a PhD in economics from New York University and a BA in Asian Studies from Dartmouth College.
China has become a major source of development finance for the developing world. Its highest profile effort is the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – Xi Jinping’s vision of providing infrastructure and connectivity along the ancient Silk Road as well as along a so-called ‘maritime route’ that goes South from China, past Southeast Asia and South Asia, and on to Europe through the Suez Canal. But China’s effort goes well beyond this one project.