COMCEC Transport and Communications
Outlook 2017
5
Transport infrastructure is crucial for both economic and social development of the nations and
“quality infrastructure is a key pillar of international competitiveness” (OECD, 2012). It is
therefore not surprising to see that developing transport infrastructure is assessed as a
powerful instrument for a wide variety of policy goals such as reducing logistics costs, poverty
(through enhancing rural road infrastructure) and congestion, and enabling the mobility of the
workforce, etc. The problems associated with the transport infrastructure vary across the
nations. For developed nations, for example, the major transportation problem is to sustain the
aging infrastructure in the most cost-effective way and to maintain their competitive power
through efficient transport networks. For least developed nations, the major concern is to
establish a transportation infrastructure by meeting at least the basic needs.
The variation in the needs of transportation infrastructure across the OIC countries is in parallel
with the situation outlined above. On the one hand, there is a group of oil producing gulf
countries with high income per capita and relatively smaller areas (except Saudi Arabia). On the
other hand, there is a large pool of OIC countries with low income per capita and relatively larger
areas, mostly from Sub-Saharan Africa. The Global Competitiveness Report 2016–2017 (WEF,
2016) of the World Economic Forum provides evidence on this gap. Five of the seven best
performing OIC countries (i.e. United Arab Emirates (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.
Table 2 presents the variation in the quality of transport infrastructure in terms of indexes
among the 38 OIC countries (i.e. 13 countries from OIC-Sub-Saharan Africa, 16 from OIC-MENA,
and 9 from OIC-Asia). The indexes range from 1 to 7, where 1 represents the extremely
underdeveloped infrastructure and 7 stands for extensive and efficient infrastructure by
international standards.
Second column of Table 2 shows the indexes for the quality of overall infrastructure (e.g.
transport, telephony, and energy) whereas the rest of the columns provide comparable indexes
for road, railroad, port, and air transport infrastructure, respectively. One implication of Table
2 is that all of the OIC and OIC-Sub-Saharan Africa averages fall below world averages in every
measure. Secondly, OIC-MENA performs better than world average in every measure but the
quality of railroad infrastructure. Finally, OIC-Asia underperforms world averages in every
measure but the quality of railroad infrastructure.