Gateways And Multimodal Corridors

Gateways and multimodal corridors are the building blocks for creating an Asian spatial economy in which competitiveness is advanced by efficient, safe and secure transport systems that support the region's success in the rapidly changing world of international commerce. Essentially, gateways and multimodal corridors are major systems of marine, road, rail, and air transportation infrastructure of regional significance for international commerce located within a defined geographical zone (see Box 2 [ PDF 15.1KB | 1 page ] and Annex [ PDF 209.9KB | 4 pages ]). They are discussed here by reference to cross-border infrastructure derived from bilateral or multilateral cooperative agreements designed to strengthen regional connectivity by broadening economic opportunities between countries in Mainland Southeast Asia, Island Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands, to permit greater accessibility to resources, technology, and knowledge (Kuroda, 2006: 1).

Gateways have been added in Figure 2 [ PDF 153.3KB | 1 page ] to the seven multimodal transport corridors identified by Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO, 2007) as reflecting Japanese business interests in Mainland Southeast Asia and Island Southeast Asia: Singapore-Bangkok, Bangkok-Hanoi, Bangkok-Yangon, Bangkok-Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi-Hong Kong/Guangzhou, Singapore-Jakarta and Bangkok-Manila. Three other corridors that are key to an understanding of the regional economies have been added: the Bangkok- Kunming-Hanoi corridor, the Singapore-Manila corridor, and the Singapore-Hong Kong, China corridor. Conversely, gateways and multimodal corridors have less currency in planning frameworks designed to develop regional integration between the island economies of the Pacific through the provision of cross-border transport and communications infrastructure.

Across Mainland Southeast Asia, comprising Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Viet Nam, inter-city corridors involve dense flows of air passengers and freight; telecommunications; and financial transfers. In some cases, there is also busy sea traffic by container ships. There is minimal cross-border land traffic to match that between Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, which is only a four-hour journey (Table 1 [ PDF 14KB | 1 page ]). Road and rail connections between Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok allow busy cross-border traffic, but mainly to and from southern Thailand, which is closer to Peninsular Malaysia than the Thai capital.

Improved cross-border access has not created new economic corridors comparable to Singapore-Kuala Lumpur-Bangkok, but generated some prosperity in what used to be remote up-country zones (Table 1).⁵ This is especially true of northern Thailand, Laos and southwest PRC as part of the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS). For political reasons, Myanmar has only partially shared in these opportunities through the flood of refugees into northern Thailand, thereby creating a plentiful supply of cheap labor. Nevertheless, Chiang Mai as the main urban focus of the region is still a city of less than 0.5 million people and the urban planning area of the Chinese border city of Jinghong, has a population of only 135,000 (UN Habitat/ADB, 2005).⁶

On the Thai-Malaysian border better cross-border infrastructure has helped to maintain some level of prosperity in the troubled southern Thai provinces which would otherwise have continued to suffer from their remoteness from their administrative and economic centre of Bangkok. This is not a new phenomenon because Penang has always extended its economic hinterland into southern Thailand, facilitated early in the twentieth century by the completion of cross-border rail connections (Dick and Rimmer, 2003). Nevertheless, the main southern city of Hat Yai, despite its economic potential, still has a population of only 363,000.⁷

Land traffic between Bangkok and Yangon, Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi in the Greater Mekong Subregion is sparse at this stage due to the mountainous topography and lack of road development (Table 1). Sea traffic is still by far the cheapest way of moving cargo doorto- door, except for valuable airfreight. In the long run, most benefit will be derived from improved road transport to Yangon because the sea route from the Gulf of Thailand is a long way round. The benefit is less obvious for Ho Chi Minh City because the sea route from Bangkok to this significant and rapidly growing economic hub is more direct, taking two– three days door-to-door by ship compared with two days by road (JETRO, 2007). Ho Chi Minh City has a more vibrant economy than Yangon and the improvement in land transport could help Phnom Penh to develop into more than an economic outpost, particularly with the attractive back haul rates on offer. Sometimes key elements of domestic infrastructure may yield a higher social return (e.g., an upgraded highway between Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi), though trade-offs with alternative investments may be difficult to discern because of the lack of clarity in national priorities.

Most discussions on the Greater Mekong Subregion focus on the Bangkok-Hanoi land connection. Despite the establishment of logistics operations between Guangzhou in southern PRC and Hanoi, the rival alternative Bangkok-Hanoi routes have yet to attract regular commercialized trucking operations. Following the completion of the Second Mekong International Bridge between Savannakhet and Mukdahan, the East-West route via Dongha, favoured by the Japanese government to connect the country's affiliated companies in Thailand with their counterparts in Viet Nam, has reduced door-to-door transit time between Bangkok and Hanoi by road from four to three days compared with 10–15 days by sea (Table 1). Yet, according to Masami Ishida (2007), the roundabout North-South Route via Kunming, preferred by the Chinese government, seems to have better prospects for road transport between Bangkok and Hanoi/Haiphong due to the route's higher population, density, and gross regional product. Even when one or both of these routes have commercialized trucking services, sea transport will still maintain its advantage in bulk transport.

Island Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands as a contiguous geographic region may be separated into five distinct zones (Figure 3 [ PDF 227.9KB | 1 page ]). First is the economic core, forming a corridor of dense traffic situated between West Malaysia, Singapore and Java. This corridor contains four main cities (Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Jakarta and Surabaya) and has a combined population of around 150 million (2005). The western side of Peninsular Malaysia is well articulated, although there are still political issues to be resolved between Malaysia and Singapore in facilitating road and rail traffic across the two bridges. In the absence of a land corridor between Singapore and Java there is dense air and sea traffic. On the island of Java itself, however, land traffic is greatly handicapped by a highly inefficient rail network and a very incomplete Trans-Java Tollway System.

The second zone, encompassing the huge, resource rich island of Sumatra, has enormous potential to link in more closely with the economies of West Malaysia, Singapore, and Java, but awaits the completion of a reliable all-weather trans-Sumatran highway and the resolution of cross-border trade facilitation issues, including flows of illegal labor migrants. Some of that potential has been recognized in the Indonesia-Malaysia-Thailand Growth Triangle (IMT-GT) linking northern Sumatra with northern Malaysia and southern Thailand. But in fact the prime international orientation of the rich Sumatra province continues to be towards Singapore. On the similarly resource-rich islands of Kalimantan, all-weather roads are now allowing a modest degree of cross-border traffic between East Malaysia and Indonesian Kalimantan, but here the economic potential is constrained by low population densities and low resource endowments.

The third zone is the Philippines, which divides into three sub-zones. The main island of Luzon, which in economic terms is not much more than Greater Manila, has a strong sea and air traffic orientation to Hong Kong, southern PRC, Taipei,China and Japan, and a lesser connection by the same modes to Singapore. The second zone comprising the Central Philippines archipelago is focused on Cebu City and, to a lesser extent, Iloilo City. The big resource-rich island of Mindanao is the third sub-zone. The problem with the economic development of Mindanao is its distance from Manila and the thirty-five year Muslim insurrection. The Philippines has been more successful than Indonesia in building land bridges between the islands connecting to roll-on roll-off and fast ferries. Nevertheless, domestic economic integration will be held back until there is some settlement of the Muslim rebellion so that Mindanao can be developed to its full potential and a solid economic axis be created between Greater Manila, Cebu, and Mindanao.

Considerable political and agency effort has gone into the development of the Brunei Darussalam Indonesia-Malaysia-Philippines East ASEAN Growth Area (BIMP-EAGA) region (Cooney, 2007). This region links Brunei, North Sulawesi and East Kalimantan (Indonesia), Sabah (Malaysia), and Mindanao (Philippines). The hope has been that an open crossborder region would help to overcome the locational and developmental disadvantage of these remote parts of all three countries. In practice, the region has lacked any core or any fundamental rationale. The insurrection in Mindanao, ongoing tensions over unofficial labor migration from Indonesia and the Philippines to East Malaysia, plus the age-old smuggling trade in the same direction, hamper efforts at integration. In other words, the liveliest economic potential consists precisely in those activities which governments seek to restrict. It is not apparent that lack of infrastructure is the critical constraint upon the much-needed economic development of this region.

The fourth zone comprising the vast expanse of Eastern Indonesia, the least developed part of Indonesia, presents a more intractable challenge. Except on the large islands of Sulawesi and the West Papua, there is very little scope for land-based communications and no alternative to air and sea transport. Sparse populations and low labor productivity rule out the development of manufacturing centers so that, except for pockets of resource exploitation or tourism, out-migration is the best prospect for economic advancement. Container movements by sea, a key indicator of the pace of economic development, in 2006 totaled only an estimated 230,000 TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units) for this zone, about the same as the estimated 220,000 TEUs for the Pacific Islands (Table 2 [ PDF 12.3KB | 1 page ]). These tiny volumes of traffic may be compared with 8.8 million TEUs for Mainland Southeast Asia and 42 million TEUs for Island Southeast Asia's Zone 1 (1.9 million TEUs for Zone 2, and 3.4 million for Zone 3).

In the fifth zone of the Pacific Islands, the development challenges mirror those of Eastern Indonesia over an even wider area and sparser populations (World Bank, 2006; ADB, 2007a). Papua New Guinea is the only landmass in the South Pacific where land-based transport has potential to integrate urban centres. Port Moresby, its capital, is the largest centre in the Pacific Islands, with a population of almost 300,000 (Table 3 [ PDF 11.9KB | 1 page ]). Beyond Papua New Guinea, Greater Suva, the capital of Fiji, has a population of 225,000 and only the main island of Viti Levu has seen any development of manufacturing (mainly textiles), but this has been undermined recently by political turmoil.

For the rest of the South Pacific, natural resource development and tourism are therefore the limits of economic potential (COA. 2006). Economic improvement for individuals and their families depends heavily on out-migration to and remittances from Australia and New Zealand. Tourism and labor flows sustain a basic network of air traffic. A daily flight connection (i.e., five or more per week) is not only the minimum level of accessibility for business people but also a very good indicator of proximity to or remoteness from the economic cores of the international economy (Figure 4 [ PDF 253.9KB | 1 page ]). Only Apia, Guam, Honiara, Nadi, Noumea, Papeete, Port Moresby, Port Vila, Rarotonga, and Nuku'alofa on this score have daily flights through to Auckland, Brisbane, Cairns, Fukuoka, Los Angeles, Manila, Melbourne, Nagoya, Osaka, Paris, Seoul, Sydney or Tokyo (Table 4 [ PDF 13KB | 1 page ]). Some direct international shipping services have been mostly replaced by feeders to and from smaller ports ‘hubbing' on local trans-shipment centers, notably Auckland for the South Pacific and Guam for Micronesia (ADB, 2007a). The problems of domestic passengers and goods movements, which for the most part involve collection and distribution to and from their tiny capital ‘cities', are almost intractable because of the minuscule scale combined with institutional failure. Governments can readily be criticized for poor investment decisions and stifling regulation, but it is unlikely without massive subsidies that private sector investment will be forthcoming on anything like the necessary scale.

The eastwards transition across the five zones from Island Southeast Asia to the Pacific highlights the benefits and the limitations of a development and infrastructure policy conceived in terms of gateways and multimodal corridors. There is a progressive switch from the well-developed multimodal inter-city corridor, stretching from Medan/Penang via Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Jakarta to Surabaya, through the resource rich areas of Sumatra and Kalimantan, the three key sub-zones in the Philippines, and the vast zone of Eastern Indonesia to the islands of the South Pacific where there are no multimodal corridors at all. These differences are of crucial importance in considering the efficiency and effectiveness of SEZs and their role in regional cooperation and integration (ADB, 2007b).

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