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

1.3 INDICATORS OF DEVELOPMENT
1.3.1. COMPARISON OF LANDLOCKED COUNTRIES AND THEIR MARITIME
REGIONAL NEIGHBORS
It has often been suggested that landlocked countries, while facing unique challenges, do not
perform worse than their maritime counterparts. In response, this chapter presents a
comparison of several key indicators for landlocked countries and their maritime neighbors.
While an in-depth statistical analysis is beyond the scope of this report, the figures below
advance the notion that landlocked countries are, in fact, achieving lower average
development levels than their maritime neighbors.
The first part of this section presents a comparison of the Human Development Index (HDI)
for landlocked countries with that of the regional maritime countries. Such a comparison
demonstrates that most landlocked countries lag far behind their maritime regional neighbors.
A significant factor contributing to such poor overall performance is the increased cost and
difficulty of trade faced by landlocked countries. Such challenges are considered in the
second part of this section, which presents both the cost of trade of landlocked countries and
their export levels. The latter measure was included only as a proxy for the difficulties of
trade, and to provide insight into the performance of landlocked countries relative to their
maritime neighbors.
Human Development
The relative state of human development of landlocked countries is presented in Table 1,
where landlocked countries are shaded. A brief examination of the table shows the
distribution of landlocked countries towards the bottom: Not one non-European landlocked
country is defined as having a high level of human development, and of the twelve countries
with the lowest HDI, nine (75%) are landlocked. Overall, the landlocked countries do worse
than their maritime neighbors in each component of the human development index: Average
GDP of landlocked countries is approximately 57% that of their maritime neighbors. Life
expectancy is three years lower.
Due to the high number of African countries at the bottom of Table 1, the above observations
may appear to be merely a result of the majority of landlocked countries being located in
Africa. Table 2 indicates otherwise, presenting the same human development indicators as in
Table 1, with the countries separated by region. With the exception of southern Africa,
landlocked countries have significantly worse levels of development than the maritime
countries of their region. In fact, not one country outside of southern Africa has a higher level
of human development than the average of its regional maritime countries. The countries of
southern Africa exceed their maritime neighbors for a number of reasons, as discussed in the
case studies, but most notably the extended civil wars in Angola and Mozambique.
Several other interesting observations can be made from this table. In particular: in eastern
Africa the life expectancy of the landlocked countries is eight years less than that of the
maritime countries; The average GDP of western Africa landlocked countries is 35% that of
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