A total of 57 countries have been approved as founding members of the Chinese-backed Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). Belgium is not among them. No nations that formally sought to become founding members of the AIIB are known to have been refused. The last seven countries approved as founding members before the deadline were Sweden, Israel, South Africa, Azerbaijan, Iceland, Portugal and Poland. The founding members include 14 of the 28 European Union countries, and 21 members of the 34-strong Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The institution aims to finance infrastructure across Asia rather than poverty reduction, and Xinhua news agency said in a
commentary that it offered Western countries “lucrative business opportunities.” The AIIB will continue to accept new non-founding members in the future.

Taiwan’s bid to become a founding member of the AIIB has been rejected, but it could join later if the name under which it would join is agreed upon. Taiwan is not a member of the United Nations, the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund (IMF) but it has joined some international organizations under different names. Taiwan is a member of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) under the name “Taipei, China.”

The United States should be a part of the AIIB and the attitude shown by the Obama administration in this regard has been regrettable, said Hank Paulson, former U.S. Treasury Secretary. “We should join the bank,” said Paulson. “It would be very difficult to have the U.S. Congress vote for anything that’s pro-China. It is a fact. I don’t think if the administration wanted to join the AIIB that they could have (because of Congress). But I do think that they sure could have said, ‘We want to be an observer, we want to work with you’. “There were two mistakes made: not joining, and if we pick a fight, we want to make sure it’s one that we are going to win, not one we are destined to lose,” he said. Paulson was Treasury Secretary under President George W. Bush from 2006 to 2009 and is a former Chairman of Goldman Sachs Group.