Access to the sea A TPF needs to take into account the most basic issues affecting a country’s prospects, including its location and geograp...
Access to the sea A TPF needs to take into account the most basic issues affecting a country’s prospects, including its location and geographic characteristics. Economists have always recognized, for example, that access to the sea is an important factor in determining a country’s ability to trade. According to Adam Smith (1776: 32), “it is upon the sea coast … that industry of every kind naturally begins to subdivide and improve itself, and it is frequently that not till a long time after that those improvements extend themselves to the inland parts”. Modern economists agree that location is critical. Economic development is “shaped very importantly by the biophysical and geophysical characteristics of economies”, according to McCord and Sachs, with incomes differing “in no small part because of sharp differences across regions in the natural resource base and physical geography (e.g. distance to coast), and by the amplification of those differences through the dynamics of saving and investment”.3 The data in table 4 confirm that countries’ access to the sea is closely related to their levels of success. Income levels in islands, isthmuses and peninsulas are three times higher than they are in the merely coastal II. TRADE AND DEVELOPMENT 1
5 countries and almost eight times higher than they are in landlocked countries. There are of course exceptional cases of islands that are relatively poor, as well as landlocked countries that are relatively rich, but “exceptional” is the key word. This distinction speaks to the importance of trade in development, insofar as those countries for which sea lanes are nearer and transportation costs are lower will typically have not only a greater propensity to trade but may also do so at lower cost. Landlocked countries are obliged to look to their neighbours for access to shipping facilities, and even if that access is relatively easy, their trade costs will inevitably be higher than those faced by coastal countries. This distinction also concerns the advantages that countries may enjoy in lucrative services sectors. In some countries, access to the sea might equate to an abundance of sun, sand, and surf. Tourism is an especially important sector for several of the more economically successful small island countries. Being an island may not guarantee the attraction of tourists, but it is undeniably an asset for many countries. Access to the sea is thus a critical issue to take into account when devising the trade policy framework for any country. Those that enjoy this feature have an opportunity that they would do well to develop and to exploit, both for their own industries and (if they should have landlocked neighbours) for their regions; those that lack it must find ways to overcome this obstacle. This one factor may outweigh almost all others, apart perhaps from endowments of mineral resources, in its capacity to shape the opportunities available to countries. The point here is not that policymakers in island countries need do nothing in order to prosper, nor that their counterparts in landlocked countries should throw up their hands in despair. The implication is that planning should start from the realization that any country’s challenges and opportunities will be shaped in the first instance by their geographic realities, and that these realities must be acknowledged and addressed directly. While it would go too far to claim that geography is destiny, it is evidently a major element in countries’ challenges and opportunities. The most important issue here is not whether countries enjoy or do not enjoy this singular advantage, but rather what steps they take either to make the most of this advantage or — if they lack it — to make up for the deficit. When preparing a TPF, researchers would do well to consider how this factor has worked into the calculations made by their counterparts in other countries. Some TPFs explicitly deal with the consequences of being an island or landlocked. While the Jamaica document observed that in some respects the country’s status as a small island State places it at a disadvantage, the TPF went on to promote a logistics hub initiative “that seeks to position Jamaica as the fourth node in global logistics (after Singapore, Rotterdam and Dubai)” in order “to push Jamaica to the centre of the global supply chain of the Americas” (p.75). Similarly, the TPF for Namibia stresses the development of transport corridors at the Port of Walvis Bay, and the Trans-Kalahari, Trans-Caprivi, Trans-Cunene, and Trans-Oranje regions. These corridors “are strategic to give a competitive positioning to Namibia as a transport hub for all regional and international trade between Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries, Europe, the Americas and beyond,” according to the TPF (p.37), and the Government also “intends to develop an international logistics hub for SADC” and “has already commissioned a project on the master plan for development of an international logistics hub”
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