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The importance of transport corridors for trade and development, including for some of the poorest countries in the world, is widely recognized in this book. A new consensus has also emerged that reducing trade costs and improving access to corridors is not just a matter of building infrastructure. The policies that regulate transport services providers and the movement of goods along corridors are important determinants of the social rate of return on such infrastructure investment. This book avoids optimistic assumptions regarding the prospects for new high-level agreements and decisions to facilitate transit or the possible benefits from increased use of technology. Instead, the authors argue that much can be done through the implementation of readily available existing tools. The use of these tools is often hampered by not only capacity constraints; but, equally if not more important, a lack of commitment. Political economic factors in both the landlocked countries and their transit neighbors must be recognized and addressed. This book offers examples of possible implementation strategies that, while challenging, should in principle help in overcoming these political economic constraints. The main message is that to bring about efficient trade corridors governments and stakeholders should focus on properly implementing the fiscal, regulatory, and procedural principles for international transit that encourage quality-driven logistics services. The various implementation challenges are the primary focus of this book.

Trade and transport corridors—major routes that facilitate the movement of people and goods between regions and between countries—have existed for millennia. They enable regions and countries to offer high-capacity transport systems and services that reduce trade and transport costs by creating economies of scale. Regional corridors are particularly important to landlocked countries, often providing the only overland routes to regional and international markets. Despite a long and complex history, guidance is often lacking on how to design, determine the components to include, and analyze the impact of corridor projects. The Trade and Transport Corridor Management Toolkit fills this void. The Toolkit synthesizes the experiences of the World Bank and other development agencies in assessing, designing, implementing, and evaluating the impact of trade and transport corridor projects. It saves project developers the task of looking for the best available tools and ensures greater consistency to facilitate comparison and benchmarking. The Toolkit will also be of immense value to policy makers in provincial and national governments as well as regional economic institutions, for several reasons: • Corridors affect the space economy of countries; they are best developed with clear estimates of the spatial impacts that can be expected. • A corridor system has multiple components, including infrastructure (roads, railways, ports), transport and logistics services, and regulations; it is important to appreciate the linkages between them, particularly as the overall performance of a corridor is determined by the weakest component. • Many parties with varying interests and motivations have a stake in corridor development. The Toolkit argues for their full participation in corridor development processes and operations. The best functioning modern corridors in the world did not happen by accident; they are often the results of coordinated development and cooperation over many years. The general principles outlined in this Toolkit should help project teams, government officials, logistics service providers, and the trade community to better appreciate both the importance of good corridor project design and the challenges of, and possibilities from, improving corridor performance.

Achieving practical trade facilitation reforms has become a key development priority in recent years. In 2001, the Bank issued a first Trade and Transport Facilitation Audit (TTFA) toolkit. The TTFA provides a simple and cost-effective instrument to analyze bottlenecks in international supply chains and prepare corrective measures. The key insight of the TTFA is that considerable knowledge can be easily obtained by interviewing key participants in the commercial or procedural transactions that combine to form international supply chains. These participants include private service providers such as freight forwarders, exporters, transporters and bankers as well as public agencies such as customs, port authorities, and transport regulators. Many government and development agencies have implemented the toolkit, including the World Bank, which has conducted about 50 audits prior to 2009. The new edition provides an opportunity not only to reflect the changes in the trade environment and the need for additional features in the toolkit, but also to benefit from the experiences of the audits already undertaken based on the original edition and hence give the new toolkit an even more operational focus. The modular organization proposed in the document should facilitate a progressive reading, by adding an increasing degree of detail. The first chapter introduces the conceptual framework for the TTFA. The second chapter discusses some of the reasons for conducting an audit. The third describes the implementation of the Audit including planning and scheduling, resource requirements and organization of the analysis and preparation of the reports. The annexes provide additional information on the concept, the methodology and content of the audit. The Interview Guides provides the scope for the meetings and checklists for all categories of interviewees and field visits. The toolkit has been written for the different possible audiences interested in trade facilitation and logistics in developing countries, including:. Policy makers in developing countries;. Development practitioners, including staff from development agencies supervising the implementation of the audits, such as Country economists or Operational task managers, in the World Bank or in other development institutions. Trade/Transport facilitation consultants or consulting firms.

Lack of adequate infrastructure is a significant inhibitor to increased trade of the countries of the Mediterranean region. Bringing their transport infrastructure to standards comparable with countries of a similar per capita GDP will be costly but worthwhile. We compare the current quantities of six types of transport infrastructure with international, and estimate the additional quantities needed to reach the benchmarks. We also estimate the cost of that infrastructure and express it as a percentage of GDP. Finally we make tentative estimates of how much trade might be generated and how this might impact on GDP. All the estimates are made for each MED11 country and for each of four scenarios. The highest need for additional infrastructure will be for airport passenger terminals (between 52% and 56%), whereas the lowest need was for more unpaved roads (between 7% and 13%). The investment (including maintenance) cost would be between 0.9% of GDP and 2.4% of GDP, although the investments in some countries would be between 1.4% and 4.5% of GDP. The impact on non-oil international trade would be substantial, but with differences between imports and exports. The overall trade balance of the MED11 region would be an improvement of between 5.4% and 17.2%, although some countries would continue to have a negative balance. A final assessment was of the benefit ratio between the increase in GDP and the cost of transport investment. This varied between about 3 and 8, an indication of the high return to be expected from increased investment in transport infrastructure. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

A trade and transport corridor is a coordinated bundle of transport and logistics infrastructure and services that facilitates trade and transport flows between major centers of economic activity. Providing a comprehensive guide to tools and techniques for corridor projects is important, as the volume of such projects is likely to increase. Corridors remain very important, especially to landlocked countries and post-conflict countries and regions. This toolkit provides a comprehensive and holistic compilation of approaches and techniques on corridor diagnostics, performance assessment, management, operations improvement, and impact evaluation. The toolkit identifies mechanisms for improving the performance of the corridor through initiatives by the public and private sectors. These initiatives include investments in infrastructure and modification of policies and regulations, especially related to trade facilitation. It also considers the government's capacity to maintain the infrastructure and regulate the flow of goods along the corridor and the private sector's ability to provide a variety of levels and quality of services, as measured in terms of time and cost. It provides tools to answer four main questions: what are the approaches to identifying the main issues and constraints to movement of trade and transport along a corridor?; how well is the corridor performing, and where are the weaknesses?; what are the options for improving the performance of the corridor?; and what are the likely impacts of investments or improvements to the corridor? The toolkit groups the four main questions into three parts, which comprise 13 modules. Part one includes four modules on how to carry out a corridor diagnostic. These modules focus on the infrastructure, regulatory, and institutional framework for a corridor. It also includes a critical module on corridor performance indicators. Part two comprises eight modules on specific corridor components. It explains how performance can be improved through targeted interventions. Part three consists of a single module, on assessing the impact of a corridor.