Does the Belt and Road Initiative reduce poverty? Evaluating grain trade openness as an intermediate policy outcome

Introduction Eradicating poverty remains a core objective of global sustainable development. While the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) provides a novel paradigm for inclusive growth, existing evaluations predominantly focus on macroeconomic aggregates, often overlooking the micro-level transmission mechanisms within the agricultural sector. Methods Leveraging the BRI as a quasi-natural experiment, this study applies a two-way fixed effects difference-in-differences (TWFE-DID) model to a panel of 131 countries from 2000 to 2023. We evaluate the initiative’s causal effect on poverty in participating countries and examine its underlying pathways. Results Our findings are threefold. First, by addressing potential “bad control” biases through a specification hierarchy, the baseline estimates indicate that the BRI significantly mitigates absolute poverty by reducing both the poverty headcount ratio and the poverty gap. Second, using a price-adjusted measure, we identify real grain trade openness as a critical intermediate policy outcome that facilitates this poverty-reducing effect. Third, the impacts exhibit significant heterogeneity: driven by an “export-led poverty reduction” pathway, the BRI’s efficacy is more pronounced in pre-treatment net grain-exporting countries compared to net importers. Discussion Furthermore, empirical tests suggest a potential institutional “substitution effect,” where poverty-reducing dividends tend to be larger in countries with low initial infrastructure and weaker historical governance. This tentatively supports a bureaucracy-bypass conjecture, suggesting that external resources can deliver direct marginal benefits to vulnerable populations in institutionally constrained nations. This study provides empirical evidence for developing nations leveraging international agricultural trade for poverty alleviation and offers policy insights for the high-quality development of the BRI.