# **3 The Effects of New Infrastructures on Transportation Times**

Before moving to the general equilibrium exercise, we need to assess how new transport infrastructure would impact transportation times in Africa. We draw upon the list of infrastructure investments from the Program for Infrastructure Development in Africa (PIDA) for our simulations.<sup>27</sup> PIDA has compiled a list of 232 priority projects for roads, ports, borders, airports, and rails, aiming to enhance regional integration and stimulate economic development by 2040. The list of active and future One-Stop-Border Posts is updated using the OSBP Sourcebook 2nd Edition May 2016.<sup>28</sup> From this list, we retain projects related to roads, ports, and border posts that can be geo-referenced and supplement it with 48 additional border posts from the OSBP Sourcebook for Africa. This results in 208 geo-referenced projects (roads, ports, and border posts).<sup>29</sup> Figure 2 displays the newly selected investments in roads, ports, and border posts. By comparing pre- and postPIDA scenarios, we can quantify the changes in shipping times induced by the new and improved transport infrastructure projects.

The implementation of PIDA projects would significantly increase the number of road and port connections and enhance the speed and processing times along numerous road segments, borders, and ports, thereby reducing shipping times for many African cities. We begin by constructing a new counterfactual transport network that includes the new road classes and investments along the land borders and ports.<sup>30</sup> First, we incorporate road improvements into the new scenario by increasing the speed from the current road type to the average speed of the region’s freeways, based on regional road speeds that are an average of country-level speeds used in Weiss et al. 2020.

Second, we reduce queuing time for border points in the new list of one-stop border posts by half, resulting in a reduction of average land border delays between African countries from 3.5 days to 2.9 days. Figure 3 reveals the large heterogeneity of delays across countries, displaying the average border delay per country. Eritrea, Saudi Arabia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Central African Republic have the longest current border delays, while Morocco has the shortest border delay. The countries that will benefit from the largest reductions in land border times are Democratic Republic of Congo, Congo-Brazzaville, South Sudan, Burundi, Cameroon, Malawi, and South Africa.<sup>31</sup> Third, when a project involves building a new port or upgrading an old port, we assume that the associated processing time decreases according to the following rule: The improved port delay equals the second-best performance in the region or the second-best performance in the continent if the port is already among the best in its region. Overall, new border and port improvements at maritime gateways will reduce the average sea border delays from and to Sub-Saharan African coastal countries by 16 percent on average, with larger gains in ports with currently the highest delays. The countries that will benefit from significant reductions in sea border times are Cameroon, Cˆote d’Ivoire, Congo-Brazzaville, Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Togo,

> 27Access the PIDA projects dashboard online at `https://www.au-pida.org/pida-projects/` .

> 28Further details available at

> `https://www.tralac.org/documents/resources/african-union/1682-osbp-sourcebook-2nd-edition-may-2016/file.html`

> 29All projects included in the analysis are listed in the Appendix in Table B2 for the road projects, in Table B3 for the border improvements, and in Table B4 for the port projects.

> 30A detailed description of the assumptions used to create our counterfactuals can be found in Appendix B.

> 31Figure 3 is an average at the country level, with some border points that benefit from a reduction in queuing time, others not.

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