Copper resource trade resilience under the belt and road initiative: Who leads, who lags?

Amid rising global geopolitical uncertainties and growing resource security risks, establishing a stable, efficient, and sustainable trade system has become a key pillar of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This study develops a multi-dimensional resilience framework and evaluates copper resource trade resilience for 63 Belt and Road countries from 2004 to 2023 using an integrated objective-weighting scheme. The results show a steady overall improvement alongside pronounced and widening disparities between high- and low-resilience countries. Spatially, a "high-resilience core" persists in Central and Eastern Europe, while a "resilience trough" concentrates in West Asia and the Middle East, revealing a durable core-periphery structure. Shapley decomposition indicates that institutional coordination and international engagement account for most of the leader-laggard gap. Exploiting staggered BRI participation, multi-period DID evidence suggests that the BRI causally strengthens trade resilience, with asymmetric and timing-dependent gains. These results inform more targeted, equity-oriented BRI policy design.