Abstract
For decades, trade between Europe and China has grown consistently, which has resulted in increased container transportation volumes. Such transportation has been dominated by sea-based options. However, over the years, an air-based mode of transport was developed, while it has lately become increasingly popular to use railways utilizing the Trans-Siberian land bridge. This latter approach boomed amid the COVID-19 crisis in 2020. However, the railway container boom in Eurasia has deeper roots than just the COVID-19 era. As is illustrated in this research work, international trade containers (trade between Russia and other countries, mostly China) and transit containers (e.g., serving the Chinese–EU route) were already showing some significance as early as 2003–2004. In 2020, their volume was already measured in the millions, regardless of the railway data source being used. This is well above the starting period in the 1980s and 1990s, when total annual volumes were around 0.1 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU). Container capacity has developed over the years, first being used for international trade and only lately for transit. As a preliminary comparison to air freight, the growth rate was roughly double that in the two-decade observation period.
Highlights
Individuals wishing to familiarize themselves with Eurasian transport and trade volumes might be disturbed by various statistics provided by different countries and regions
If the same number is taken from Eurasian Rail Alliance (ERA) sources, this figure is approximately 50% lower, at 0.547 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU) [2]
In Europe, a common reporting body does not exist, and Eurostat figures can be delayed by several years; earlier research has shown that even Eurostat figures can differ from these two other sources mentioned earlier [3]
Summary
Individuals wishing to familiarize themselves with Eurasian transport and trade volumes might be disturbed by various statistics provided by different countries and regions. For railway container transport between Europe and Asia, we base our statistics on Russian sources, such as the Coordinating Council on Trans-Siberian Transportation (CCTST) [16] statistics (currently called the International Coordinating Council on Trans-Eurasian Transportation—ICCTET) This is motivated by the fact that most of the railway volume comes through the Trans-Siberian Railway route (see Figure 1) in one form or another (either utilizing Russian sea ports in the Far East, the Manchurian hinterland connection, the Mongolian hinterland connection, or the Kazakh hinterland connection). It took a few years for the Finnish-led wave to reach the Chinese wave, which we are currently living through This new international dimension is the main reason for the growth of container transportation in the landbridge during 2020. Even in environments with lower raw material prices, this trade has been growing in recent years, and Russia’s overall trade with China is already larger than that of the UK or India [20]
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