Potential Opportunities for the Arctic Transport Space

Abstract

Two distinct routes from Europe to South-East Asia via the seas of the Arctic Ocean are considered in the work: the Northern Sea Route (NSR) and the Northwest Passage. Potential opportunities for the Arctic transport space under the conditions of melting polar ice and expanding navigation period on the Arctic Ocean are substantially increasing. Some alternatives to the NSR and Northwest Passage are described: a) by sea – this is the transport artery going along the Suez Canal; b) by land – these are the transport arteries including the Trans-Siberian Railway (Trans-Sib). The research is aimed at creating a model of the international transport corridor. The model is based on the autoregressive distributed lags (ADL) model. Separate models are constructed for the Northern Corridor, the Trans-Siberian railway, the transport corridor of the Suez Canal and the Northwest Passage. Factors influencing the endogenous variable of the model, consisting in the volume of goods transported for all corridors, are analysed. The exogenous variables were selected separately for each model. The time series covers the 1990-2013 period. The major steps of the implementation of the ADL-model are described: testing the endogenous and exogenous variables for auto-correlation; checking for stationarity of the time series; regression analysis. Finally, conclusions pertaining to the comparison of the NSR with other transport corridors are drawn.