The role of infrastructure and distance in the case of the Belt and Road Initiative
This dissertation is submitted in part requirement for the MSc Spatial Data Science and Visualisation in the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, Bartlett Faculty of the Build Environment, UCL.

This paper address calls in literature to incorporate transport literature into studies of international trade and extends this by advocating for a systems-based solution. The study focuses on the effects of different measures in international trade literature on the collection of trading entities as a whole and specifically in identifying most efficient paths across which goods could be transported. To achieve this, a proof of concept network is created based on the Belt and Road Initiative at country and route level and outcomes compared. Findings suggests that route-level analysis could potentially lead to more accurate estimations of countries along routes as well as the distance travelled. Finally, as a stepping stone towards a means of examining international trade from a systems point of view, the framework and data processing flows are proposed as a baseline on which future complementary work can expand based on the published material on GitHub.

This repository holds all code, data extractors, data downloads and analysis outputs part of this project. The figure below maps out the various interconnecitions.