Washington may want countries in the developing world to pick sides between the US and China, but they are doing everything they can to avoid falling into permanent camps, the head of the UK’s development finance body told Semafor.
“Geopolitics is complicating the world of development finance,” Leslie Maasdorp said during a Semafor World Economy Global Leaders Dinner in Bangkok. He added that even as Western-led development finance bodies, such as his British International Investment, implicitly espoused a differing set of values from China’s, prioritizing clean power made it impossible to remove Chinese firms from supply chains given their dominance of the sector.
His remarks stand in contrast to those from the head of the US Development Finance Corporation, who told Semafor last month that Washington was, at least in the tech arena, looking to expand infrastructure aligned with the US. “Not building on US-friendly rails would be madness,” he said.
— Prashant Rao