If the data from the last two years are considered, Serbia is the world champion in terms of borrowing and capital inflow from China, the Serbian weekly "Nedeljnik" recently reported.

In these two years, Serbia received a total of 8,03 billion dollars from China, including Chinese investments, making the country the world leader, the research states.China Global Investment Tracker” by the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation. From 2005 to 2022, over 17 billion dollars from China were invested in Serbia.

For comparison, according to the same research, only 2005 million dollars from China entered Macedonia in the period from 2022 to 650.

The data reported by "Nedeljnik" say that only from 2016 to 2021, 3,03 billion dollars were invested from China in Serbia by Chinese companies, primarily through the purchase of the Bor mine in Bor and the Ironworks in Smederevo.

In addition to this, from 2010 to last year, the Serbian authorities borrowed almost 14 billion US dollars from China, and these funds were used for the construction of traffic and utility infrastructure.

On the world list of countries that borrowed the most from China or attracted Chinese capital in the past two years, after Serbia, Turkmenistan is in second place, while Saudi Arabia is third. They are followed by Indonesia, the Netherlands, Colombia, Hungary and Iraq.

The extensive analysis of "Nedeljnik" shows that Serbia took the first Chinese loan in 2010, but after the coming to power of Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic and the Serbian Progressive Party, the state leadership actually turned drastically towards China.

Until 2012, the most significant source of capital for Serbia was the European Union and the United States of America, from where, in addition to donations, loans arrived through the EU and European development banks.