Improving Transnational Transport Corridors
In the OIC Member Countries: Concepts and Cases
11
(Schiff and Winters, 2002), then it is clear that IFIs have a considerable influence on the
regionalization agenda, of which corridor development is very often a component. This would
have the effect that countries seeking funding largesse will comply and set up a corridor,
complete with a secretariat and an investment plan. The IFIs generally make it clear to its
client / partners that investment will be prioritized to those projects that are located within
the corridor rather than other national projects. Emerson and Vinokurov (2009) commented
on massive budgets that have been allocated to the Europe West China Project for example.
The response is for nations to add various variations and deviations to the main route to
comply with funding eligibility. Funding agencies are usually accommodating because of the
pressure that their operations are to disperse the funding that has been allocated. This leads to
the creation of complex international networks, rather than a straightforward single road / rail
corridor. This can be observed by looking at one of the oldest set of transport corridors, those
of the Trans European Networks for Transport (TEN-T).
The TEN-T are a planned set of roads, railways, airports and canals in the European Union. It
aims at removing bottlenecks, upgrade infrastructure and streamline cross border transport
operations for passengers and businesses throughout the EU. It will improve connections
between different modes of transport and contribute to the EU's climate change objectives.
Core network corridors (CNC) were introduced to facilitate the coordinated implementation of
the core transport network and European Corridor Coordinators were appointed to secure an
effective and efficient development. Each Coordinator has to draw up a work plan, which
guides the development of the corridors in the short and longer term and by that establishes
the basis for actions until 2030.
Thus, another perhaps less obvious objective to the formation of corridors, is to attract more
funding from IFIs.
Of the 196 countries in the world 48 are land locked. The need for land locked countries to be
connected to the sea for trade is an imperative that transport corridors satisfy. As stated by
Faye et al. (2004), landlocked countries often lag behind their maritime neighbors in overall
development and external trade. While the relatively poor performance of many landlocked
countries can be attributed to distance from coast, the researcher argues that several aspects
of dependence on transit neighbors are also important. Usefully for this assignment, Faye et al.
(2004) discuss four such types of dependence: 1) dependence on neighbors’ infrastructure; 2)
dependence on sound cross-border political relations; 3) dependence on neighbors’ peace and
stability; and 4) dependence on neighbors’ administrative practices.
Transport corridors are mostly certainly advantageous to land locked countries, Arvis (2011)
notes that the logistics performance indices (World Bank, 2016) for land locked countries is
usually lower than maritime countries and the existence of transport corridors makes a
significant difference to price and time. The World Bank explains that the main sources of costs
are not only physical constraints but widespread rent activities and severe flaws in the
implementation of the transit systems, which prevent the emergence of reliable logistics