COMCEC Transport and Communications
Outlook 2019
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average is 164 km. This suggests that the length of the rail network is inadequate to serve the
OIC population, evenwithout taking into consideration that almost half of the OIC countries have
no railway network.
Regarding the rail freight transport, statistics show that rail freight carried in the OIC-Asia
region predominantly belongs to Kazakhstan and is far above other regions. In the OIC-MENA
region, Iran and Turkey together carried more than two-thirds of region’s rail freight.
Regarding total fleet growth, the OIC countries fell below the world average between 1998 and
2016 while container fleet growth has been similar to that of the world during the same period.
Nevertheless, the share of shipping companies from the OIC countries, does not reflect OIC’s
share in global trade. In terms of LSCI scores, despite a decrease in 2016, from 2007 on, OIC-
MENA performed better than OIC-Asia and world averages while the last two kept pace with
eachother throughout the 2004-2016 period.
The container throughput of the OIC countries has reached 101 million TEU in 2014 up from
79.8million TEU in 2010. The OIC-MENA region outperforms other regions in terms of container
port traffic. In the OIC-MENA region UAE, Egypt, and Turkey were the top performers regarding
container throughput. For the OIC-Asia region most of the traffic were handled by a few
countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia. It should also be underlined that the scope of the
container port traffic is very limited in the OIC-Sub-Saharan Africa.
Tha data shows that the share of OIC countries in the global container throughput has remained
flat at around 15% in the 2010-2014 period. Both Malaysia and the UAE show high volume
throughput with 22.7 million TEU and 20.9 million TEU, respectively. On the other hand, there
are also many OIC countries which are landlocked, i.e. Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Burkina Faso,
Chad, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Mali, Niger, Tajikistan, Uganda, and Uzbekistan. Besides,
majority of the OIC countries couldn’t even reach the one million TEU threshold.
The container penetration intensity in several OIC countries were many times lower than the
rate for the global market and far lower than that of developed countries. Especially, some OIC
countries such as Nigeria, Algeria, and Bangladesh show very low container volumes in
comparison with the size of their economies and populations.
Regarding air transport, Turkey, Indonesia, and UAE has the highest air passenger traffic. In
terms of geographical classification, Turkey, UAE, and Saudi Arabia in the MENA; Nigeria, Togo,
and Mozambique in the Sub-Saharan Africa; and Indonesia, Malaysia, and Pakistan in the Asia
were the top three OIC member countries with highest air passenger movement. Almost two
thirds of the air passengers is carried at MENA region while one third is carried at Asia.
The high per capita air passenger movements in the high-income countries, such as Qatar, UAE,
and Bahrain, and in the island countries, such as Brunei Darussalam and Malaysia, are also
noteworthy. Thanks to their well-established hub-and-spoke system, large network airlines