There’s been a lot of discussion since the Group of 7 countries announced the creation of the new Build Back Better World (B3W) initiative. It is nominally intended to help developing countries build badly-needed infrastructure. But B3W also includes an underlying political objective: presenting an alternative, some call it a “rival,” to China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

The problem for a lot of observers is that without any details of the B3W plan, it’s difficult to accurately assess whether it will provide countries with access to new pools of capital, or if it’s just another in a long string of “vaporware” policies like the Blue Dot Network, the Asian-African Growth Corridor, and the Clean Network…