13 - Central Asia: Typical landlocked region across Eurasian continent

Abstract

This chapter first presented the current situation regarding gateway competition among Eurasian ports for international maritime containers to/from Central Asia (CA). Next, the input data for developing a model was described and then, policies related to infrastructure investment and cross-border facilitation in Pakistan and its neighbors were examined by the model simulations. Namely, three different kinds of related policies were examined: the decline of national border barriers, launching of new container train service and launching of new container port. The decline of border barriers in the CAREC countries would significantly impact the choice of gateway seaports for each CA country as well as inland regions of Russia and China, resulting in an increase in throughputs in Chinese ports and decrease in those in Far Eastern Russian ports, an Iranian port, and the Baltic Sea ports. The new container train services connecting the northeast China and Russia would be competitive among the existing routes; in particular, the transport route via Manzhouli would have a potential to carry more than 150,000 containers per year in both directions. The port of Gwadar can handle more than 30,000 TEU/year total for export and import laden containers if the rail is connected, which enables several liner services to call at the port sustainably. If the rail is even connected with not only the CA countries via CAREC corridor 5, but also China via the CPEC, much of the containers would use the port of Gwadar, which can be partly shifted from the ports in other regions, not only the existing Pakistani ports. The impact on the throughputs would synergistically increase if the border barriers are decreased at the same time.