Economic preparation of the environment: A selective empirical analysis of Chinese investment in the Philippines
Masters thesis — Naval Postgraduate School, 2017. Full text: https://archive.org/details/DTIC_AD1046364
Arguments
Economic preparation of the environment: A selective empirical analysis of Chinese investment in the Philippines
It turns "economic statecraft" from a buzzword into a measurable claim — investment flows, mapped as networks, either show strategic design or they don't.
China has used foreign direct investment and development aid in the Philippines as economic statecraft aimed at countering U.S. presence and influence in the Asia-Pacific; the thesis tests this by applying geospatial, link, and social-network analysis to a dataset of Chinese investments in the Philippines from 2006 to 2016.
Why it matters
It turns "economic statecraft" from a buzzword into a measurable claim — investment flows, mapped as networks, either show strategic design or they don't.
Use when: Money leaves a map — run investment flows through network analysis and grand strategy stops being a theory and becomes a diagram.