COMCEC Transport and Communications
Outlook 2019
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7. CONCLUDING REMARKS
This Outlook aims at providing a brief picture of the transport and telecommunication sector in
the OIC countries.
The analysis reveals that there is a positive correlation between the LPI scores and international
merchandise trade (excluding oil exports) as well as the GCI scores of the OIC countries. This
might imply that if an OIC country has a high LPI score this gives it a competitive advantage over
those with lower LPI scores as it can facilitate its international trade through its enhanced
logistics infrastructure and services. According to the 2016 LPI scores, among the OIC countries,
UAE, Qatar, Malaysia, and Turkey come on top of the rankings, while Tajikistan, Sierra Leone,
Mauritania, and Somalia come at the bottom.
World Bank’s Liner Shipping Connectivity Index (LSCI) scores of the OIC countries, which aims
at capturing a country's level of integration into the existing liner shipping network, show that
Malaysia (106.8), UAE (70.6), Morocco (64.7), and Egypt (62.5) are well connected to the global
shipping network whereas Albania (3.9), Brunei (4), Guinea Bissau (4.5), and Guyana (4.9) are
least connected. In terms of average LSCI scores, OIC-MENA region performed better than OIC-
Asia region as well as the world starting from 2008. On the other hand, average LSCI scores for
OIC-Sub-Saharan Africa region remained well below the world averages.
One implication of this is that the best performing countries have large transhipment ports (e.g.
Malaysia, Morocco, and Egypt) and gateway ports (e.g. Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey). On
the other hand, the least performing countries are either not located on the main liner shipping
services or lack the physical and operational capacity to serve large container ships.
With regard to burden of custom procedures, both OIC-Asia and OIC-Sub-Saharan Africa fell
below world averages for the 2007-2015 period, whereas OIC-MENA is an exception with its
recent progress.
With respect to transport infrastructure, OIC overall and OIC-Sub-Saharan Africa averages fell
below the world averages for every transport infrastructure measure according to the Global
Competitiveness Report 2016-2017 (WEF, 2016) while OIC-Asia performed better than world
averages only in the quality of railroad infrastructure. OIC-MENA, on the other hand, is the best
performing OIC region which outperforms all the world averages except the quality of railroad
infrastructure. Five of the seven best performing OIC countries (i.e. UAE, Malaysia, Bahrain,
Qatar, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Oman) in terms of quality of transport infrastructure are oil
producing gulf countries. On the other hand, nine out of eleven worst performing OIC countries
(i.e. Benin, Cameroon, Chad, Lebanon, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra
Leone, and Yemen) in the same measure are from Sub-Saharan Africa.