the challenges facing landlocked developing countries: a case study ...

On the positive side, a landlocked location can be less burdensome in some circumstances.
Botswana, for instance, exports mainly diamonds, which are shipped by air and thus not
dependent on accessing neighbors’ infrastructure. Another example is Swaziland, which is
mostly surrounded by upper middle-income South Africa, a country with good infrastructure,
relatively large internal markets, and large amounts of capital for inward investment. These
countries have thus prospered economically despite their landlockedness.
Aim
While numerous planning papers, legal documents, and transport studies have addressed
issues of transit through neighboring countries, near all focus on specific nations or regions,
thus precluding a global cross-country analysis. 3 Other papers focus on distance to port alone
or consider agglomerated economic, social, and financial data for landlocked countries 4
thereby not addressing the specific problems of the political, transit and social environment.
This report seeks to further the discussion by presenting a set of 30 case studies to distill the
unique challenges each one faces. 5
The case studies form the core of this paper, and are presented on a region-by-region basis in
Part II. Highlighting the main lessons of these case studies, the remainder of Part I proceeds
in two sections. The first outlines key messages from the case studies by describing the
regions most and least affected by infrastructural, political, conflict and administrative issues
in each region. The second then presents some key indicators of development across
landlocked countries.
A few caveats should be highlighted regarding the case studies. They do not attempt to
describe the general economic or political situations of the countries studies, unless they are
linked to transit routes. This paper forms a type of reference tool on transit linkages, one to
which the reader can refer back when considering the details of a country’s economic
situation. Thus there is some repetition between case studies, since many of the issues that
apply to an individual country also apply to the rest of its region. To minimize such
repetition, a short overview of regional issues is included at the beginning of each geographic
grouping of countries, along with a regional map.
The structure of the case studies is standardized throughout, but the reader will notice that it
varies slightly across countries and regions. This is for two main reasons. First, the varying
nature of landlockedness in each country requires a different set of emphases in its case
description. Second, comparable data on landlockedness are not available across most
countries. There are no standardized assessments of rail, road or port quality in transit
neighbors, nor of administrative procedures at borders or of transit-related political relations.
This probably speaks to the low level of attention often paid to the nature of landlockedness
around the world. To build a somewhat standardized set of case studies, one has to pull
3 As detailed in Glassner (1995).
4 For example, Limao and Venables , MacKellar and Wörgötter (2000), Radelet and Sachs and Stone (2001)
5 The countries included in the study are those with a Human Development Index less than 0.76.
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