Endnotes

¹Besides cross-border trade, opportunities exist for co-production, land-based tourism and integration of infrastructure services. Successful implementation requires political will and goodwill; hardware (infrastructure); software (streamlined competitive procedures, facilitation in cross-border movement of goods and people); and stronger organizations and better governance (ADB, 2005).

²Even the Canadian-USA border has a huge impact, although the 20:1 differences between inter-provincial exports in Canada reported by McCullum (1995) have been reduced.

³Centrifugal forces, promoting the spatial concentration of economic activity, are linkages, thick markets, knowledge spillovers and other pure external economies; centrifugal forces, opposing such concentration, are immobile factors, land rent/commuting, congestion and other pure diseconomies (Fujita, Krugman and Venables, 1999: 9 and 346).

⁴The issue is how to balance urban and rural investments. Urban is not necessarily bad, rural necessarily good. In Australia much money has been wasted on unnecessarily fine rural roads in the vastness of Western Australia when only in 2010 is a dual highway nearing completion between the two main agglomerations of Sydney and Melbourne.

⁵ADB (2005: 18) defines an “economic corridor as a well-defined geographical area centered on a transport corridor integrated with the development of other infrastructure and economic activities through planned and systematic project, policy, and institutional interventions”.

⁶Jinghong is the capital of Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture, Yunnan province, PRC with a provincial population of 376,000 (including Jinhong).

⁷The Greater Hat Yai-Songkla Metropolitan Area has a registered population of almost 713,000, but an estimated real population over one million).

⁸Reportedly, the SEZs have worked well in Taipei,China, South Korea, China and Viet Nam, where governments wanted a high degree of control over how their economies opened, but have been less successful in Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand, where the addition of a few square kilometers of plants and roads have not reversed the overall effect of the economy (Adams, 2007).

⁹Woodbridge (2008) reports that SEZs play a role in the trans-shipment and transit of counterfeit goods, prompting the International Trade Association (ITA) to urge government intervention to halt this traffic.

¹⁰Akinci (2006) defines an SEZ as an integrated development, over 100 km2 in area, having no typical location, with multi-use eligible activities, and serving domestic, internal and export markets.

¹¹According to Akinci (2006), this trend is associated with the increasing importance of supply chain management, outsourcing, the rise of value-added services, the switch from supply driven to consumer relationships; development of integrated clusters, and the co-location of sales and manufacturers to attract integrated manufacturing clusters. Also, Akinci sees the special economic mega-zone reflecting the policy trends towards global integration through the World Trade Organization (WTO), deepening of regional trade blocs, harmonization of taxes and investment rules, liberalization of telecommunications and IT sectors, and enhanced trade and supply chain security.

¹²The WTO requires SEZs to phase out their export-subsidy component by 2010 in conformity with the provisions of its Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures Agreement adopted during the Uruguay round between 1986 and 1994 (Woodbridge, 2008). Only the poorest WTO members (i.e. under US$1000 per capita) will be able to offer duty-free import an export rights in a SEZ. Making these adjustments will primarily apply to manufacturing-based SEZs rather than those with strong commercial or logistics elements.

¹³The SEZs in Cambodia are designed to develop islands of good governance as a shortcut towards attracting foreign investment where reforms to legal systems and the construction of infrastructure nationwide are tardy (Adams, 2007).

¹⁴The 2003 CMTA is a multilateral instrument designed to facilitate the cross-border movements of people and goods within the GMS. Specifically, it provides on designated routes for: “(i) single stop inspection; (ii) crossborder movement of persons (including visas for those engaged in transport operations; (iii) transit traffic regimes, including exemptions from physical customs inspection; (iv) bond deposit, escort, and agriculture and veterinary inspection; (v) requirements that road vehicles will have … to be eligible for cross-border traffic; (vi) exchange of commercial traffic rights; and (vii) infrastructure, including road and bridge design standards, road signs and signals (Kuroda, 2006: 13).

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