metadata: authors: 0: author: De Soyres,Francois Michel Marie Raphael
1: author: Mulabdic,Alen
2: author: Murray,Siobhan
3: author: Rocha Gaffurri,Nadia Patrizia
4: author: Ruta,Michele
count: World
docna: 0: docna: How Much Will the Belt and Road Initiative
            Reduce Trade Costs ?
docty: Policy Research Working Paper
subtopic: International Trade and Trade Rules,Transport Services,Ports & Waterways,Trade and Services
teratopic: International Economics and Trade,Transport
abstracts: cdata!: This paper studies the impact of
            transport infrastructure projects of the Belt and Road
            Initiative on shipment times and trade costs. Based on a new
            data on completed and planned Belt and Road transport
            projects, Geographic Information System analysis is used to
            estimate shipment times before and after the Belt and Road
            Initiative. Two sets of data are computed to address
            different research questions: a global database based on an
            analysis of 1,000 cities in 191 countries and 47 sectors and
            a regional database that focuses on more granular
            information (1,818 cities) for Belt and Road economies only.
            The paper uses sectoral estimates of “value of time” to
            transform changes in shipment times into changes in ad
            valorem trade costs at the country-sector level. The
            findings show that the Belt and Road Initiative will
            significantly reduce shipment times and trade costs. For the
            world, the average reduction in shipment time will range
            between 1.2 and 2.5 percent, leading to reduction of
            aggregate trade costs between 1.1 and 2.2 percent. For Belt
            and Road economies, the change in shipment times and trade
            costs will range between 1.7 and 3.2 percent and 1.5 and 2.8
            percent, respectively. Belt and Road economies located along
            the corridors where projects are built experience the
            largest gains. Shipment times along these corridors decline
            by up to 11.9 percent and trade costs by up to 10.2 percent.
            The paper also shows that these effects are magnified by
            policy reforms that reduce border delays and improve
            corridor management.
repnme: repnme: How Much Will the Belt and Road Initiative
            Reduce Trade Costs ?
display_title: How Much Will the Belt and Road
            Initiative Reduce Trade Costs
listing_relative_url: /research/2018/10/30498867/much-belt-road-initiative-reduce-trade-costs
topicv3: Transport m1326661 135,Trade m1326924 698,Trade in Services m1326928 780,Ports m1327399 167,Transport Infrastructure m1327632 1803
publishtoextweb_dt: 2018-10-15T00:00:00Z
historic_topic: International Economics and Trade,Transport
no_of_pages: 43
author_keys: 0: author_key: 1594973
1: author_key: 1259324
2: author_key: 892365
3: author_key: 995092
4: author_key: 1245806
model_extractions: WPS8614 Policy Research Working Paper 8614 How Much Will the Belt and Road Initiative Reduce Trade Costs?

_François de Soyres Alen Mulabdic Siobhan Murray Nadia Rocha Michele Ruta_ Macroeconomics, Trade and Investment Global Practice Middle East and North Africa Region Development Research Group October 2018
Policy Research Working Paper 8614

# **Abstract**

This paper studies the impact of transport infrastructure projects of the Belt and Road Initiative on shipment times and trade costs. Based on a new data on completed and planned Belt and Road transport projects, Geographic Information System analysis is used to estimate shipment times before and after the Belt and Road Initiative. Two sets of data are computed to address different research questions: a global database based on an analysis of 1,000 cities in 191 countries and 47 sectors and a regional database that focuses on more granular information (1,818 cities) for Belt and Road economies only. The paper uses sectoral estimates of “value of time” to transform changes in shipment times into changes in ad valorem trade costs at the country-sector level. The findings show that the Belt and Road Initiative will significantly reduce shipment times and trade costs. For the world, the average reduction in shipment time will range between 1.2 and 2.5 percent, leading to reduction of aggregate trade costs between 1.1 and 2.2 percent. For Belt and Road economies, the change in shipment times and trade costs will range between 1.7 and 3.2 percent and 1.5 and 2.8 percent, respectively. Belt and Road economies located along the corridors where projects are built experience the largest gains. Shipment times along these corridors decline by up to 11.9 percent and trade costs by up to 10.2 percent. The paper also shows that these effects are magnified by policy reforms that reduce border delays and improve corridor management.

This paper is a joint product of the Macroeconomics, Trade and Investment Global Practice; the Office of the Chief Economist, Middle East and North Africa Region; and the Development Research Group, Development Economics. It is part of a larger effort by the World Bank to provide open access to its research and make a contribution to development policy discussions around the world. Policy Research Working Papers are also posted on the Web at http://www.worldbank.org/ research. The authors may be contacted at fdesoyres@worldbank.org; amulabdic@worldbank.org; smurray@worldbank.org; nrocha@worldbank.org; mruta@worldbank.org.

_The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent._ Produced by the Research Support Team
# **How Much Will the Belt and Road Initiative Reduce Trade Costs?**<sup>**1**</sup>

François de Soyres, Alen Mulabdic, Siobhan Murray, Nadia Rocha and Michele Ruta World Bank JEL Code: F14, F15, R41 Keywords: Transport Infrastructure, GIS Analysis, Shipment Times, Trade Costs 1 We thank Alan Deardorff, Michael Ferrantino, Caroline Freund, David Laborde, Mathilde Lebrand, Aaditya Mattoo, Chunlin Zhang, and seminar participants at the World Bank for helpful suggestions and Tristan Reed and Sasha Trubetskoy for their help in gathering information about transport infrastructure linked to the Belt and Road Initiative. Errors are our responsibility only.

Disclaimer: The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.
# **1. Introduction**

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a development strategy proposed by China that focuses on connectivity and cooperation on a trans‐continental scale. It roughly follows and expands the old Silk Road on the land side and complements it with a maritime part to build a series of economic corridors with the goal of boosting trade and stimulating economic growth across Asia, Europe and Eastern Africa.<sup>2</sup> The range of initiatives and activities that will be part of the BRI is very wide, including policy coordination, infrastructure, trade and investment, financial and people‐to‐people exchanges. In this paper, we focus on the consequences of transport infrastructures linked with the Belt and Road Initiative and quantify the associated decrease in shipment times and ultimately trade costs. We build two new databases with estimates of trade cost changes across sectors and country‐pairs and provide an analysis of the systemic impact that the BRI may have on trade costs for all countries in the world.

The new databases presented in this paper are composed of two sets of data that can be used to address different research questions. The global database contains information based on an analysis of 1,000 cities in 191 countries and 47 sectors. The regional database contains the same variables but focuses on the 71 economies that are part of the Belt and Road Initiative and is computed with a higher degree of granularity.<sup>3</sup> In particular, the focus on fewer countries allows to include in the analysis a larger number of cities.

In terms of method, we first use a combination of geographical data and network algorithms to compute the reduction in shipping times between all city pairs in our analysis. As a starting point, we use the current network of railways and ports across the world and employ a shortest path algorithm to compute an estimate of the current shipping times between every pair of cities. We use assumptions regarding the average speed for different transportation modes as well as data for the processing time when reaching a port or when crossing borders. From this reference point, we run a series of “improved scenarios”, where the transportation network is enriched with all planned infrastructure projects that are linked to the Belt and Road Initiative. We show that by increasing the number of rail and port connections and by improving the speed and processing times for improved rail segments and ports, the Belt and Road Initiative can significantly contribute to decreases in shipping times between a large number of city‐pairs in BRI economies as well as in many other countries.

A complex issue is how to deal with the possible switch of transport modes once BRI infrastructure projects are completed. In computing the shipping times post‐BRI, we consider two alternative

> 2 The Belt and Road Initiative is structured around two main components, (i) the Silk Road Economic Belt (SREB), and (ii) the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road (MSR). More specifically, the “Belt” links China to Central and South Asia and onward to Europe, while the “Road” links China to the nations of South East Asia, the Gulf Countries, East and North Africa, and on to Europe. Those parts are themselves organized around six economic corridors: (1) the China‐Mongolia‐Russia Economic Corridor; (2) the New Eurasian Land Bridge; (3) the China–Central Asia–West Asia Economic Corridor; (4) the China–Indochina Peninsula Economic Corridor; (5) the China‐Pakistan Economic Corridor; and (6) the Bangladesh‐China‐India‐Myanmar Economic Corridor.

> 3 There is no official list of countries in the Belt and Road Initiative. For this study, we focused on a list of 71 economies (Annex 1). Countries in the list should be interpreted as economies that are geographically located along the Belt and Road as proposed by China.

2
specifications in order to build a lower bound and an upper bound for our estimates. In the lower bound scenario, we prevent mode switching between the pre‐BRI and the post‐BRI shipping routes so that the decreases in shipping times are solely driven by a denser network of links. Under this assumption, the average decrease in shipping time is 1.2 percent across all country pairs. In the upper bound scenario, we allow for mode switching, so that some trade routes can move from maritime links to rail‐based links and hence experience a larger gain in shipping time. In this scenario, the decrease in shipping time at the world level reaches 2.5 percent. Overall, our results underline the importance of network effects in transportation and feature a wide geographical dispersion in the benefits from the BRI. Indeed, our estimated gains are spread across the world, with all countries experiencing a decrease in shipping time with at least one of their partners. BRI economies experience a decrease in shipment times ranging between 1.7 and 3.2 percent on average. The largest estimated gains are for the trade routes connecting East and South Asia. We also find that shipment times along economic corridors fall substantially, ranging between 3.6 percent for the China‐Mongolia‐Russia Economic Corridor (CMREC) to 11.9 percent for the China‐Central Asia‐West Asia Economic Corridor (CCWAEC).

We then use Hummels and Schaur (2013) sectoral estimates of “value of time” to transform reductions in shipping time into reduction in ad‐valorem trade costs. Since Hummels and Schaur’s (2013) estimates are very disaggregated (at the HS2 or HS4 level), we need to aggregate them for each country pair using appropriate trade weights. We work with 47 sectors based on the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) categorization and excluding services. Since each of those sectors contains many HS2 or HS4 categories, the composition of trade flows within each GTAP sector differs across country pairs. Hence, we compute the “value of time” for each pair of countries and GTAP sector to reflect the actual composition of each sector within each origin‐destination flow. These country pair‐sector values of time can be further aggregated to quantify changes in trade costs by country.

The results combining our GIS network analysis and the ad‐valorem conversion suggest that implementing all BRI transport infrastructure projects will result in a large decrease in trade costs for many countries. For the world, the reduction of aggregate trade costs ranges between 1.1 percent in the lower bound scenario and 2.2 percent in the upper bound scenario. For the BRI economies, the change in trade costs will range between 1.5 and 2.8 percent, under the lower and upper bound scenario respectively. As for shipping times, the gains in trade costs exhibit significant heterogeneity across pairs of countries, with East Asia and Pacific as well as South Asia being the regions with the larges average reductions. Finally, trade costs have the sharpest drops along corridors, ranging between 2.4 percent for the China‐Mongolia‐ Russia Economic Corridor (CMREC) and 10.2 percent for the China‐Central Asia‐ West Asia Economic Corridor (CCWAEC).

The focus of this paper is the impact of BRI‐related transport infrastructure projects on shipment times and trade costs. But the Belt and Road Initiative includes efforts to improve the efficiency of customs, reduce border delays or to improve management of economic corridors. As an extension of our main database, we present two scenarios where those elements are explicitly taken into account. We find that the implementation of complementary policy reforms magnifies the impact on shipment times and trade costs, especially along the corridors. For instance, if border delays were reduced by half, the reduction of shipment times along corridors would range between 7.7 percent for the China‐Indochina Peninsula Economic Corridor (CICPEC) and 25.5 percent of the China‐Central Asia‐West Asia Economic Corridor 3
(CCWAEC). Similarly, trade costs would fall by 5.6 percent for the China‐Indochina Peninsula Economic Corridor (CICPEC) and by 21.6 percent for the China‐Central Asia‐West Asia Economic Corridor (CCWAEC). These large effects are not surprising given the importance of trade facilitation bottlenecks in BRI economies (Bartley Johns et al., 2018).

Our paper relates to several strands of literature. First, the importance of time as a trade barrier has been studied extensively in the literature and the heterogenous sensitivity of products to shipment delays has been documented in a number of papers including Hummels (2001), Hummels, Minor, Reisman, and Endean (2007), Djankov, Freund and Pham (2010), Hummels and Schaur (2013) and Baniya (2017). Second, several recent studies have analyzed the trade effects of infrastructure projects either within or across countries (Donaldson, 2018; Duranton, Morrow and Turner, 2014; Alder, 2017). Third, a subset of this literature also relies on georeferenced data and GIS analysis to assess the trade and the spatial effects of transport infrastructure (e.g. Roberts, Deichmann, Fingleton and Shi, 2010; Volpe Martincus, Carballo and Cusolito, 2017). By providing precise estimates of the potential decrease in trade costs expected from the Belt and Road Initiative, our databases are being used as inputs in papers assessing the potential implications of the BRI for trade flows, foreign investment, GDP and welfare (e.g. de Soyres, Mulabdic and Ruta, 2018; Baniya, Rocha and Ruta, 2018; Maliszewska, van der Mensbrugghe and Osorio‐Rodarte, 2018; Chen, 2018; Bird, Lebrand and Venables, 2018).

The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the database on BRI transport projects and the methodology used to measure shipping times. Results of the network analysis are presented in Section 3, while the impact of the BRI on trade costs is analyzed in Section 4. Section 5 presents two extensions of the analysis. Concluding remarks follow.

# **2. Network analysis: Method and assumptions**

The Belt and Road Initiative covers a large number of transport projects in many countries. The consequences of implementing all those improvements is a priori very hard to forecast: for example, the benefit from building a new segment of rail might depend on the construction or upgrade of a new port at the end of the rail when joining the coast. Furthermore, the optimal route between two cities might depend on the implementation of several projects, which means that one cannot study transport infrastructures independently from one another. The interconnectedness of all elements in the transportation network poses a challenge to any researcher trying to estimate the changes in trade costs that can reasonably be gained from the BRI.

In order to embrace the complexity of network effects while at the same time taking into account all planned BRI transport projects and all countries in the world, our analysis is based on an estimation of shipping times. Specifically, our goal is to develop and implement a structured method to compute the shipping time between all city pairs in the world before the BRI and after the implementation of all identified BRI transport projects. This section presents our methodology and assumptions in detail.

## **a. Overall method**

As a starting point, we build a network model which takes into account in a precise way the current transportation network and we use it to compute shipment times between all city‐pairs using a shortest 4
path algorithm. From this reference point, we run multiple “improved” scenarios that account for the planned infrastructure projects linked to the BRI and we assess the reduction in shipping times resulting from these projects. The list of projects we consider and the associated assumptions for the computation of shipment time is described in the next sub‐section.

We carry out the analysis using a GIS software which allows us to precisely map the current transportation network and then to enrich it with the planned infrastructure improvements that can be linked to the BRI. In particular, we use ArcGIS Network Analyst which provides network‐based spatial analysis tools for solving complex routing problems. A network solution involves finding the shortest path between two locations, where the length or cost of a path is the total accumulated shipping time computed along the optimal path.

In our analysis, we focus on rail and maritime links, abstracting from road and air connectivity, which allows to simplify the network analysis. Two main reasons justify this approach. First, as discussed in detail below, the large majority of BRI transport projects consist of rail and maritime infrastructure. Second, most international trade travels by sea and, to a smaller extent, by rail. Maritime shipping accounts for 80% in volume and 70% in value of global trade (OECD, 2017) and rail is the second transportation mode used, while only a small portion of international trade travels by road and air. GTAP data indicate that for BRI countries the percentage of international shipments by water and land is around 90%. According to shipping data, this fraction is even higher for China.<sup>4</sup> The nodes of our network in the global database, which serve as both origin and destination in the analysis, are all cities with population greater than 500,000,<sup>5</sup> as well as the two most populous cities in each country (data permitting). This creates a total of 1,000 cities and includes 34 cities with reported population less than 50,000. In our regional database, we use all cities above 100,000 inhabitants within the BRI countries under consideration, which leads a total of 1,964 cities in 71 economies. The network is solved for each origin‐destination pair, with routing determined by shortest time path, adjusting for preference parameters.<sup>6</sup> The use of a network analysis to quantify shipment times and the impact of new and improved transport infrastructure has benefits and drawbacks. On the plus side, a network analysis can be a useful tool to support modeling of international trade flows. It can enhance the understanding of the impact of changes in infrastructure or other factors on an interconnected system allowing to extract information from spatial data. Specifically, a network analysis allows to obtain realistic measures for the time it takes to go from one location to another taking into account the overall quality and quantity of infrastructure, physical

> 4 See Annex 2 for more data on modal shares in the world and in the BRI countries. Air shipment represents a small fraction in terms of trade volume, but a larger one in terms of value since it concerns goods with higher value on average.

> 5 Population sources are https://www.citypopulation.de/world/Agglomerations.html and <u>http://data.un.org/Data.aspx?d=POP&f=tableCode%3A240</u>

> 6 To “attach” cities to elements of the transportation network (a rail segment or a port), a fuzzy tolerance of 10km was used. As a result, any city located more than 10km away from any network element is left as unconnected and de facto excluded from the results.

5
obstacles (e.g. rough terrain) or other barriers (e.g. border delays), and relative performance measures (e.g. processing time at ports or when crossing a border).

As with any modeling exercise, it should be noted that our network is a simplified version of reality and results are affected by the quality of inputs. For example, we do not include some elements that could affect routing, such as rail gauge, freight or passenger lines, service frequency, etc. An additional limitation that needs to be acknowledged comes from the fact that the Belt and Road Initiative includes some efforts that are not easily introduced to the network: improving efficiency of customs, special economic zones, reducing border delays or an improved management of economic corridors. As an extension of our main database, in Section 5 we present two scenarios where those elements are explicitly taken into account. Finally, our results are driven by a number of assumptions regarding the speed along different path as well as the choice of transportation mode, the processing time when reaching a port and the time it takes to cross a border. We describe those assumptions in detail below.

# **b. Transport network and BRI‐related transport infrastructure projects**

We start with an initial network of links connecting all cities considered in our analysis, and we then add additional links and improved speed corresponding to transport infrastructure projects that are linked to the Belt and Road Initiative. Our initial network comes from Delorme Atlas of the Earth (DAE), 2015 release. For our analysis, maritime features were generated separately for the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans, and for the Caribbean Basin and Seas of Indonesia. To simulate plausible trans‐oceanic shipping routes, great‐circle arcs<sup>7</sup> were generated from port locations along the boundary of Exclusive Economic Zones. Within the Caribbean Basin, around Indonesia, and near land, connectivity to major ports was manually digitized using a map of Global Shipping Routes (ESRI, CIA, 2012).

When building our estimates of shipping time reductions that can be associated with the BRI, we need to enrich the current transportation network with planned projects. Compiling a list of transport infrastructure projects associated with the BRI is a delicate task since there is no one criterion that could be used to define what is or is not part of the initiative. In particular, there might be projects financed by loans from China that might not necessarily fall under the BRI, and there might be projects with non‐ Chinese funding that are still considered in some sources as being part of the BRI.

We start from the list of infrastructure projects developed by Reed and Trubetskoy (2018) and which considers projects respecting all three following criteria:

1. The project is explicitly mentioned in one of the following sources as being part of BRI: either document issued by a government (including government press agencies), or article in a major academic journal or global news source or a quote by a government official in a reputable news source.

2. The project is at least in the planning phase.

3. The project impacts travel between two cities of at least 300,000 inhabitants.

These criteria present the advantage of restricting our list to projects that have been indeed related to the BRI and to exclude some projects for which feasibility might be in question. For example, condition 2

> 7 Shortest distance between two points on the surface of a sphere, measured along the surface of the sphere.

6
excludes the Moscow‐Beijing high speed rail or the Bering Strait connection, which were proposed but have no real plans. Moreover, condition 3 excludes small road projects in Cambodia that are clearly not along any shortest path linking major cities.

We then simplify the list of projects from Reed and Trubetskoy (2018) and keep only the rail and maritime elements. Then, to ensure consistency with the information on the ground, we validate it with the help of World Bank country teams. As a result, the exact list of all projects used in the analysis and sources can be found in Table A1 in annex. We then geo‐localize each of these projects in our map and generate links with the current rail lines, ports and maritime links, which creates a denser transportation network on which we can run our shortest path algorithm.

Beyond the data by Reed and Trubetskoy (2018), other sources of information on BRI investment have been compiled elsewhere and might have different inclusion criteria. One example is the WIND BRI database, which gathers China’s Oversea Direct Investment (ODI) projects in BRI countries. Compared to the data used in our paper, this source is both more restrictive along certain aspects as it contains only projects that are associated with ODI, and at the same time more extensive in the sectoral coverage. Moreover, it comprises planned projects for which ODI amounts have been announced, which is likely to be more restrictive than our definition. Note that some projects still appear in both our list and the WIND database, such as the Malaysia East Coast Rail Link Project or the Moscow‐Kazan High Speed Rail Project. Another example of alternative source is the database collected by Reconnecting Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)<sup>8</sup> which includes transportation projects (roads, rails, ports, bridges and tunnels) as well as other elements such as electrification projects of special economic zones in Asia.

# **c. Working assumptions**

_The multimodal network used in this analysis was constructed by merging two types of features: maritime and rail._<sup>_9_</sup> _These features are largely non‐overlapping and separated in space. The shortest path algorithm is used to find the shortest routing (in terms of shipping time) between any city‐pair in our network and taking into account all possible ways to link the origin city to the destination city. In order to find such optimal route, each network element is associated with a time cost which is accumulated along the route to sum up to the total shipping time. Time is then calculated as the segment length divided by speed, where the speed of distinctive features is presented in_ Table 1.

_Table 1: Speed assumption for different transport modes_

|**Description**<br>**Pre‐BRI**<br>**Post‐BRI**|
|---|

> 8 The database is available online at https://reconnectingasia.csis.org/

> 9 On top of rail and maritime networks, there are a few particular cases where we added road segments for cities characterized by extremely low or inexistent rail connectivity. This happened in exactly 8 cases for the following cities: Osh (Kyrgyzstan), Kabul (Afghanistan), Thimpu (Bhutan), Kigali (Rwanda), Guatemala City & Mixco (Guatemala), San Salvador (El Salvador), León & Managua (Nicaragua) and Belmopan (Belize). In those cases, we used a speed of 25km/h for the associated road segment.

7
|**Maritime**|25 km/h|25 km/h|
|---|---|---|
|**Upgraded rail**|50 km/h|75 km/h|
|**New rail**|–|75 km/h|

The choice of transportation mode is difficult to model and follows different logics and trade‐offs which are specific to the sector under consideration. It depends on the different elements that affect shipping costs such as the bulkiness of the good, subsidies, oil price, market structure and many others that cannot be modeled in a sensible way in our analysis. To account for the very high share of maritime shipping in international trade, we use a network preference to produce a maritime alternative where land connectivity exists. Within the optimal path algorithm, this preference is implemented in the following way: for any city pair that has access to both a maritime and a rail link, the algorithm selects the maritime option whenever the shipping time is lower than four times the shipping time incurred using the rail link. While such a criterion can be seen as a strong simplification of the actual trade‐off faced by many logistic companies, the imposition of such a preference for maritime links allows us to have a representation of the world that is very much in line with other data sources in terms of both modal shares and total shipping times at the city‐pair level. For example, in our pre‐BRI scenario with the global database, maritime transportation represents a total of 82.3% of all trade routes. In the following sub‐section, we explain in detail how we deal with the possibility of mode switching once all BRI projects are implemented.

On top of the time cost computed along the network elements, we account for processing times when a shipment is reaching / leaving ports, based on the estimates in Slack, Comtois, Wiegmans and Witte (2018). In their paper, Slack et al (2018) use data from Lloyds Intelligence Unit and base their estimates on a sample of 17,024 vessels in 2013. In our network, we use their regional averages reported in Table 2. In the context of our analysis, these processing times correspond to a “penalty” incurred when reaching a port, either from the land and from the sea, and correspond to the time it takes to load or unload the goods. In the improved scenario, 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:

# **Improved Port Delay = Max (0.5*Baseline port Delay, Lowest Worldwide Processing Time)**

This rule allows us to account for a proportional decrease in port delay of 50 percent with a limit that no port can be more efficient than the worldwide lowest estimate of 17.2 hours.

_Table 2: Processing time in ports as estimated by Slack, Comtois, Wiegmans and Witte (2018)_

|**Region**|**Mean Ships Time In Port**<br>**(hours)**|
|---|---|
|Central and South America|23.5|
|South and South‐East Asia|26.5|

8
|East and North Asia|17.2|
|---|---|
|Gulf and Red Sea|26.8|
|Mediterranean|20.3|
|Northern Europe|29.5|
|North America – East Coast|21.1|
|North America – West Coast|46.2|
|South Africa|64.6|

Finally, processing time when crossing an international border is also an important part of overall shipment time for international trade. To account for border delays in our computations, we include importing and exporting time from the “trading across borders” section in the World Bank’s Doing Business Database.<sup>10</sup> The data is available for each country considered in our analysis and Table 3 presents the average values aggregated by region. To get bilateral values for border delays for each directed country‐pair, we compute the total border delay as the sum of importing and exporting time for each origin and destination respectively. Whenever a border is crossed along the optimal route, the “border penalty” is incurred.

_Table 3: Export and Import processing time at the border (from the Doing Business Database)_

|**Region**|**Time to export: Border compliance**<br>**(hours)**|**Time to import: Border compliance**<br>**(hours)**|
|---|---|---|
|**East Asia & Pacific**|55.9|70.5|
|**Europe & Central Asia**|28|25.9|
|**Latin America & Caribbean**|62.5|64.4|
|**Middle East & North Africa**|62.6|112.3|
|**South Asia**|59.4|113.8|
|**Sub‐Saharan Africa**|100.1|136.4|

# **d. Reality‐check: How do our pre‐BRI estimates compare with other sources?**

In the previous subsections, we presented the method and assumptions we used to construct estimates of shipping time between city‐pairs across the world. We now ask the following question: how do our estimates before the BRI compare with other sources of information regarding shipping time? This allows us to verify the adequacy of our working hypothesis, in particular regarding the speed along different network elements, the border delays and the port processing time. While those estimates cannot be

> 10 For any border, we use the data on “Border Compliance” and the total delay is assumed to be the sum of export time from the exporting country and the import time from the importing country. We do not include documentary compliance as it does not relate to travel time. All data are available at: <u>http://www.doingbusiness.org/data/exploretopics/trading‐across‐borders</u>

9
compared with actual data for all city‐pairs because such data are not available, it is still possible to compare our figures for specific city‐pairs using various sources.

In Table 4, we corroborate our results using data from Tan and Reja (2018). In this paper, the authors conducted interviews with China based companies and collected information regarding the time it takes to ship products by train for certain destinations. While still featuring some differences, our pre‐BRI figures are broadly consistent with the quotes from private companies.

_Table 4: Comparison between shipment time declared by survey participants (Tan and Reja (2018)) and our “pre‐BRI’ results._

||**Survey**|**Our “Pre‐BRI” scenario**|
|---|---|---|
|**Lanzhou to Almaty**|10 days|8.95 days|
|**Lanzhou to Astana**|10 days|8.40 days|
|**Manzhouli to Yekaterinburg**|9 days|‐|
|**Qiqihar to Yekaterinburg**<br>(Qiqihar is 650km east of Manzhouli)|‐|12.2 days|

_Note: This table focuses on rail links_ Along the same lines, Table 5 presents a comparison between our own estimates and quotes that can be found online from a company specialized in maritime transportation.<sup>11</sup> Again, we find that our estimates are not far from the information we can gather from private companies, which is another validation of the method and the assumptions used.

_Table 5: Comparison between commercial information and our “pre‐BRI’ results._

||**CFC**|**Our “Pre‐BRI”**<br>**scenario**|
|---|---|---|
|**Dalian to Hamburg**|34 days|34.04 days|
|**Shanghai to Antwerp**|32 days|32.32 days|
|**Guangzhou to Bremen**|29 days|32.40 days|
|**Shanghai to Rotterdam**|27 days|32.41 days|

_Note: This table focuses on maritime links. Commercial information comes from CFC: cargofromchina.com._

# **3. Effects of the Belt and Road Initiative on shipping times**

In this section, we present the results on shipment times from the network analysis before and after the Belt and Road Initiative. We first construct two scenarios: a lower bound scenario, where exporters cannot switch mode of transport after the BRI infrastructure projects are completed, and an upper bound

> 11 See at https://cargofromchina.com/china‐europe/

10
scenario where the transportation mode can change. Then we proceed to estimate the effects of the BRI on shipping times under these two scenarios.<sup>12</sup>

# **a. The lower bound scenario**

Recognizing that choices of transportation mode do not only take into account shipment time but also shipment costs and other considerations, we build our main estimates of reduction in shipment time by avoiding large changes in transport mode before and after the BRI. These are conservative estimates as the new BRI infrastructure might actually induce some firms to substitute maritime link in favor of rail links which might be more expensive but also significantly faster. By not considering these changes, the estimates should be interpreted as the minimum gains in terms of shipping time that can be achieved by taking advantage of all new and upgraded transport links but without any change in the transportation mode.

In the previous section, we showed that the network analysis results in the pre‐BRI scenario are in line with other data sources both in terms of city‐pair shipping times and in terms of aggregate modal shares. Taking those results as a starting point, we build a first post‐BRI scenario where the shares of maritime and rail transportation modes would not exhibit significant change for each city‐pair. To do so, we use a two‐steps procedure. We provide here an intuitive description of our method and give a more detailed explanation in the annex.

We proceed in two steps. First, we run a network analysis with all BRI transport projects taken into account and find the optimal shipping route between all city‐pairs, keeping our maritime preference as in the pre‐ BRI computation. Second, for each origin‐destination, we compute the share of maritime and rail in the optimal path and compare them to the modal shares from the pre‐BRI scenario. If the optimal route after the BRI features a change in the modal share lower than 5%, we keep the result as is since there is no major shift in transportation mode. If, instead, the optimal route features a modal switch above 5%, we run additional scenarios and change the preference for maritime links until we find a shipping route post‐ BRI that keeps the transportation mode unchanged.

The procedure described above allows us to obtain results at the city‐pair level where before and after BRI travel time can be compared in a sensible manner. It should be emphasized that this lower bound scenario indeed corresponds to a conservative estimate since exporters benefit from an improved network but they cannot take advantage of those improvements to change their transportation mode. Figures 1 and 2 below show two examples of routes before and after the BRI where there is no significant mode switch – and which therefore are part of the lower bound analysis. In Figure 1, we can see that the shipping route between Beijing and Dushanbe goes through rail links both before and after the

> 12 One difficulty of such a network analysis is the association of each city with an “entry point” in the transportation network – usually referred to as “snapping”. Because cities are never exactly located on the network, we need to specify a snapping tolerance when performing this step. Since we compare two scenarios

> ( _before_ and _after_ the BRI), we also need to make sure each city is associated with the same snapping unless there is a new network element in their surroundings. To ensure we do not have inconsistencies between scenarios, we compare the snapping and manually exclude all cities featuring difference between scenarios. The number of cities quoted in the paper (1,000 in the global database and 1,964 in the regional database) reflects the cities selected through this procedure and which are actually used in our analysis.

11
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ranges between 1.2 and 2.5 percent. In other words, the BRI is expected to contribute to a decrease in shipping times of 7 to 15 hours across all country‐pairs in the world. It is important to note that this average is taken with respect to all possible country pairs in the world, some of which are not or very little affected at all by the BRI.

To have a better sense of the consequences of the BRI we aggregate the results across pairs of regions.<sup>13</sup> Looking at the figures in Table 6, one can notice several interesting patterns. First, as expected, the East Asia and Pacific region is experiencing the largest decrease in shipping times vis‐à‐vis all the other regions (first column in Table 6). The highest gains are between the East Asia and Pacific and South Asia, with the average gains reaching 4.67 percent when aggregating across all country pairs. Second, while not all pairs of regions are expected to have gains (there is no change in shipping time between North America and the Latin America), every single region will benefit with at least some of their partners. As an example, it is worth noting that the Latin America and Caribbean region is expected to decrease the shipping time by 1.15 percent with countries in the South Asia region.

At a more disaggregated level, the results also feature significant heterogeneity when looking across country‐pairs (Figure 4 and Figure 5). For example, among the top ten countries experiencing the largest decrease in shipping time with China, there are countries in Asia (Kirghizstan, Bangladesh, Malaysia) but also countries in Africa (Tanzania, Mauritius, Kenya). These results show why it is important to use a network approach in order to understand the interconnections of all planned infrastructures: the gains in Kenya are the results of the infrastructure in both Kenya and in several countries in Asia. The benefits from the Lamu port and LAPSSET rail corridor in Kenya are magnified by the rails in Myanmar, Thailand and Pakistan as well as the port projects in Kyaukpyu (Myanmar) and Gwadar (Pakistan).

_Table 6: Proportional decrease in shipment time, aggregated by regions – Lower Bound._

||East Asia &<br>Pacific|Europe &<br>Central Asia|Latin America<br>& Caribbean|Middle East<br>& North<br>Africa|North<br>America|South Asia|Sub‐Saharan<br>Africa|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|East Asia &<br>Pacific|**2.01**|||||||
|Europe &<br>Central Asia|**2.70**|**1.15**||||||
|Latin America<br>& Caribbean|**0.71**|**0.75**|**0.00**|||||
|Middle East<br>& North<br>Africa|**2.99**|**0.38**|**0.05**|**0.14**||||
|North<br>America|**1.06**|**0.74**|**0.00**|**0.18**|**0.00**|||
|South Asia|**4.67**|**0.88**|**1.15**|**0.70**|**1.49**|**3.59**||
|Sub‐Saharan<br>Africa|**2.54**|**1.06**|**0.55**|**0.91**|**0.47**|**2.59**|**0.97**|

_Note: Results are from the Lower Bound analysis and averaged over all country‐pairs in each region‐pair._

> 13 Regions are defined using the World Bank classification.

15
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database only, as the main results are valid when considering trading times across countries from the regional database.

A difficulty in this exercise is that the sensitivity of trade flows to shipment time strongly depends on the characteristics of the product considered. In other words, the “value of time” is not equal across industries. Among many sector‐specific characteristics governing the impact of time on trade, one can cite the rate of depreciation, storability, seasonality, demand uncertainty or substitutability with domestic products. All those traits influence the elasticity of shipment time to trade flows and it is important to take into account this heterogeneity across sectors.

In the rest of the section, we first discuss the methodology used to transform shipment times into trade costs, then we present the results for the global and regional databases.

# **a. From shipment times to trade costs**

To transform the shipment times from our network analysis into trade costs, we use the seminal work of Hummels and Schaur (2013). This paper provides estimates for the ad‐valorem value of a shipment day for many sectors, at both four‐digit and two‐digit levels of disaggregation in the Harmonized System (HS). Recognizing the fact that air cargo is many times more expensive than maritime transport but arrives in destination markets much faster, Hummels and Schaur (2013) use U.S. imports data and detailed information on the premium paid for air shipping and in time lags for ocean transit to identify consumers’ valuation of time. To our knowledge, these results constitute the most comprehensive and detailed estimates of value of time at the sectoral level, providing rich heterogeneity and overcoming several endogeneity issues faced by previous work.

An obvious limitation of these estimates is that they are based on information from the United States, which might create at least two types of potential biases when using the values for a worldwide analysis. First, there may be a selection issue since the United States does not have positive imports in every sector, which means that we must rely on averages for some sectors. Second, the value of time may be to some extent country‐specific. Consumers in different countries could be characterized by different valuation of delivery time, because of different taste or different ability to store goods. Below, we discuss extensively in this section how we deal with the first problem. The second problem cannot be easily solved due to lack of data. It is a caveat to bear in mind, although the direction of the bias is difficult to assess ex ante.

In order to construct new data for the ad‐valorem “value of time” in GTAP, we must aggregate the estimates at HS‐levels from Hummels and Schaur (2013) into GTAP sectors. To perform such aggregation, it must be noted that GTAP sectors are aggregates of many HS categories which are represented with different weights for different country‐pairs. As a result, a given GTAP sector should not necessarily be associated with the same “value of time” when we consider different origin and destination countries. To make things clear, let us describe the following simplistic example. A GTAP sector named GTAP_1 is made of three HS categories HS_1 HS_2 and HS_3. The associated “value of time” raw estimates for the HS categories are τ<sup>HS1</sup> , τ<sup>HS2</sup> and τ<sup>HS3</sup> respectively.

Looking at the trade flows between two countries (Country 1 and Country 2) for the GTAP sector GTAP_1, we observe that the composition of GTAP_1 is not the same when country 1 is exporting or importing: 20
_Table 8: Disaggregated trade flows between country 1 and country2 in sector GTAP_1_

|**Origin**|**Destination**|**GTAP Sector**|**HS Category**|**Τ**|**Trade Flow**|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|Country 1|Country 2|GTAP_1|HS_1|τ<sup>HS1</sup>|5|
|Country 1|Country 2|GTAP_1|HS_2|τ<sup>HS2</sup>|20|
|Country 1|Country 2|GTAP_1|HS_3|τ<sup>HS3</sup>|10|
|Country 2|Country 1|GTAP_1|HS_1|τ<sup>HS1</sup>|30|
|Country 2|Country 1|GTAP_1|HS_2|τ<sup>HS2</sup>|10|
|Country 2|Country 1|GTAP_1|HS_3|τ<sup>HS3</sup>|5|

For each directed pair of countries, we then build the “value of time” associated with the trade of GTAP_1 from the origin to the destination, by taking the trade‐weighted average of the underlying HS estimates from Hummels and Schaur (2013). Using the numerical example above, the value from country 1 to country 2 and from country 2 to country 1 are then computed as: To build the appropriate trade‐related weights, we use UN Comtrade data on trade flows which we aggregate at the 4‐digit or 2‐digit levels to construct sector and origin‐destination specific weights for the aggregation.<sup>15</sup> One particular issue when building the aggregation is the treatment of missing values. While Hummels and Schaur (2013) provides “value of time” estimates for many sectors at either HS2 or HS4 levels, the data also contains many missing observations. Since the US imports only a subset of all HS categories, it is not surprising that data are missing for many HS categories. As discussed in Minor and Hummels (2013), the treatment of those missing values is an important component of the aggregated results.

One solution could simply be to discard, in the aggregation, HS sectors for which we do not have estimates of the value of time. Doing so yields the possible issue that GTAP aggregated values might be computed based on an arbitrarily small fraction of actual trade flows. This, in turn, can then bias aggregated values if the only HS4 sectors for which we have non‐missing data for the cost of time feature an abnormally high

> 15 Regarding which level of aggregation is the most useful in our case, our preference goes with the HS2 level estimates. HS4 level results present the advantage to cover more disaggregated sectors which can be important in some applications, the associated estimates are more likely suffer from a low number of observation which makes the results more sensitive to measurement errors and outliers. Estimates at the HS2 levels pool together sectors that might not be homogenous, but are based on a higher number of observations within each category and, hence, feature more realistic values.

21
(or low) value. If those sectors represent only a small fraction of total trade flows, it would be misleading to impose an extreme value of time costs to all HS4 categories within the given GTAP sector.

We take a different approach to deal with the missing values. Specifically, we follow Minor and Hummels (2013) and replace missing values at the HS4 level by the average of non‐missing ones within any given GTAP sector. Doing so enables us to use trade flows of all HS4 / HS2 categories in the construction of weights. We clarify our procedure with the numerical example developed above. Consider the case where Hummels and Schaur (2013) were not able to estimate τ<sup>���</sup> , for example because the U.S. data do not feature any import of this category. In such a case, we create an average value τ<sup>���</sup> computed as the average “value of time” of all non‐missing HS categories within the GTAP sector. If the world consists of only our two countries 1 and 2, the formula for τ<sup>���</sup> would be simply: We then replace missing values in our data set with those averages and obtain: _Table 9: Disaggregated trade flows between country 1 and country2 in sector GTAP_1_

|**Origin**|**Destination**|**GTAP Sector**|**HS Category**|**Τ**|**Trade Flow**|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|Country 1|Country 2|GTAP_1|HS_1|τ<sup>HS1</sup>|5|
|Country 1|Country 2|GTAP_1|HS_2|τ<sup>HS2</sup>|20|
|Country 1|Country 2|GTAP_1|HS_3|τ<sup>���</sup>|10|
|Country 2|Country 1|GTAP_1|HS_1|τ<sup>HS1</sup>|30|
|Country 2|Country 1|GTAP_1|HS_2|τ<sup>HS2</sup>|10|
|Country 2|Country 1|GTAP_1|HS_3|τ<sup>���</sup>|5|

Using this procedure enables us to create “value of time” for each GTAP sector and origin‐destination pairs that contain at least one HS category that is traded. Of course, country pairs that do not trade at all a given GTAP sector cannot be associated with any “value of time”. We then build the ad‐valorem time barrier by simply multiplying the shipment time (computed using the network analysis described in Section 3) and the value of time aggregated from HS2 estimates derived above. It is important to keep in mind that for a given shipment time, the ad‐valorem time barriers feature sectoral heterogeneity: some sectors are highly time sensitive (for example perishable products) while others are not. Table 10 presents the percentage decrease in total trade barrier, as a percentage change from the initial value.

22
_Table 10: Percentage decrease in total time‐trade barriers due to the BRI_

||**Min**|**Max**|**Mean**|**Std Dev**|
|---|---|---|---|---|
|||**Wo**|**rld**||
|**% decrease in time‐trade barrier – Lower Bound**|0.0%|61.52%|1.19%|2.63%|
|**% decrease in time‐trade barrier – Upper Bound**|0.0%|65.16%|2.49%|3.66%|
|||**BRI Co**|**untries**||
|**% decrease in time‐trade barrier – Lower Bound**|0.0%|61.52%|1.74%|3.34%|
|**% decrease in time‐trade barrier – Upper Bound**|0.0%|65.16%|3.24%|4.51%|

_Note that time‐trade barrier is the product of shipping time and the value of time from Hummels and Schaur (2013) aggregated into GTAP sectors._ The last step is to calculate the total trade costs. Overall, the time barrier associated with the shipment between two cities is only a fraction of trade costs, which also contains the actual transportation cost as well as the tariffs and other monetary charges that can be applied between respective countries. In the previous section, we focused our analysis on the decrease in trade barriers that can be achieved from a reduction in shipping time and estimated associated decrease in ad‐valorem costs. We now need to account for the fact that trade costs encompassing these other elements. In particular, we assume that total trade costs are defined as follows:

# **Trade Cost = tariff + transport + time cost**

Assuming that both tariff and transportation costs are unchanged, we now compute the decrease in total trade costs that can be expected from the sheer decrease in shipping time and the value of time computed above.

We use data from the latest release of the GTAP database, version 10. One of the main advantages of the GTAP database is the ability to use data related to both tariffs and transport costs at the sectoral level. The complete database contains a total of 57 sectors. In our analysis, we focus on the 47 good sectors and do not consider the remaining 10 service sectors as the value of time and the economic determinants of trade costs for services are very different and outside of the scope of this paper. Moreover, the complete data set also contains information on other macroeconomic variables such as input‐output matrices or sectoral employment and sales, which can be very useful when using our estimates in the context of a lager general equilibrium model that needs to be calibrated.

One of the caveats of using GTAP, however, is the geographical aggregation is less precise than our previous shipping time analysis. The data contain a total of 140 “regions” and an aggregated rest of the world. While this aggregation means that we are decreasing the geographical granularity of our results, it enables us to build trade costs estimates in a consistent way for a large number of countries and sectors.

# **b. Results**

We now present the key results of the impact of BRI related transport projects on trade costs based on the global database. Compared to the figures presented in Section 3, which related to changes in shipping 23
time only, the results presented in this section feature two main differences. First, because trade barriers are not only composed of the time element but also the actual logistical costs and tariffs which we assumed to be unaffected by the BRI, the decrease in trade costs are lower than the decrease in shipping time. Second, while results presented in Section 3 were inherently symmetric across country‐pairs, the reductions in trade costs are _not_ symmetric. This is due to the differences in the basket of goods traded within country pairs. If, for example, country A exports mostly time sensitive goods to country B, but imports only time insensitive goods, then a reduction in shipping times will induce a larger decrease in export costs than in import costs for country A and vice versa for country B.

Table 11 gives a first overview of our results for both our lower bound and upper bound scenarios. The decrease in trade costs associated with the BRI features a lot of geographical and sectoral heterogeneity. On average, the decline in trade costs associated to BRI projects ranges between 1.05 and 2.19 percent. For some country‐pairs this decline is zero, while the maximum change ranges between 61.52 and 65.16 percent.

_Table 11: Percentage decrease in trade costs due to the BRI_

||**Min**|**Max**|**Mean**|**Std Dev**|
|---|---|---|---|---|
|||**Wo**|**rld**||
|**% decrease in trade cost – Lower Bound**|0.0%|61.52%|1.05%|2.43%|
|**% decrease in trade cost – Upper Bound**|0.0%|65.16%|2.19%|3.40%|
|||**BRI Co**|**untries**||
|**% decrease in trade cost – Lower Bound**|0.0%|61.52%|1.50%|3.07%|
|**% decrease in trade cost – Upper Bound**|0.0%|65.16%|2.81%|4.18%|

_Note: Summary statistics across all country‐pairs and sectors in the world._ Table 12 presents the non‐symmetric matrix of trade cost changes by region‐pair. The results display a similar pattern to the one previously discussed for the shipping time: East Asia and Pacific has the largest gains, followed by South Asia. Some pairs of regions experience no or small changes in trade costs, but all regions have significant gains with at least one of their trading partners. The systemic nature of the Belt and Road Initiative is apparent from the results. First, gains are not limited to the BRI economies or to country‐pairs involving at least one BRI economy. For example, averaging across sectors, the decrease in trade costs between Australia and Kirghizstan amounts to 11.1 percent, among the top 2 percent of all country‐pair gains. Trade costs between these two countries are expected to decrease from the BRI especially from the new railways and ports in Pakistan.

Second, the largest decrease in trade costs are not captured by the countries with the largest amount of transport projects. With more than 2,500km of new rail and more than 1,000km or upgraded rail, Mongolia is among the countries with the highest investment. When computing the proportional decrease in trade costs with all its partners weighted by import flows (which could be interpreted as the average decrease in import costs for the country), Mongolia experiences a decrease of only 3.22 percent. The same computation for Kenya reveals a decrease in import cost of more than 4.65 percent even though the country is expected to build 1,800km of new rail and a new port.

24
_Table 12: Proportional decrease in trade costs, aggregated by regions._

||East Asia &<br>Pacific|Europe &<br>Central Asia|Latin America<br>& Caribbean|Middle East &<br>North Africa|North<br>America|South Asia|Sub‐Saharan<br>Africa|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|East Asia &<br>Pacific|**1.46**|**2.42**|**0.64**|**2.50**|**0.96**|**3.55**|**2.19**|
|Europe &<br>Central Asia|**2.39**|**0.91**|**0.72**|**0.32**|**0.70**|**0.74**|**0.95**|
|Latin America<br>& Caribbean|**0.65**|**0.71**|**0.00**|**0.04**|**0.00**|**1.08**|**0.51**|
|Middle East &<br>North Africa|**2.69**|**0.31**|**0.04**|**0.11**|**0.17**|**0.56**|**0.79**|
|North<br>America|**0.99**|**0.66**|**0.00**|**0.15**|**0.00**|**1.21**|**0.41**|
|South Asia|**3.84**|**0.81**|**1.06**|**0.57**|**1.32**|**3.17**|**2.30**|
|Sub‐Saharan<br>Africa|**2.40**|**1.03**|**0.53**|**0.85**|**0.45**|**2.44**|**0.86**|

_Note: Results are from the Lower Bound analysis and averaged over all country‐pairs in each region‐pair._ The unit of observation in our results is at the origin‐destination‐sector level.<sup>16</sup> We aggregate the observation for each country to provide an overview of the results. Naturally, there are different ways to aggregate the results at the country level. For example, trade costs are expected to decrease by 6.1 percent between Cambodia and Denmark, which is very significant. But what is the meaning of such a decrease for a firm in Cambodia that does not source any input from Denmark and/or does not sell any good to Denmark? One possible aggregation scheme consists of weighting all destinations by import or export flows and hence gain some insight regarding the potential gain for a global buyer or seller in each country. Figure 8 and _Figure 9_ present such an aggregation and show the gains weighted by import flows, so that the results can be interpreted through the lenses of a firm that sources its inputs from abroad.

An important caveat to bear in mind is that aggregating all destinations using _current_ trade flows (either imports or exports) as weights might give a biased view of the results. Indeed, current trade weights only provide a static view of the world and do not account for the dynamic impact of the BRI. By reducing trade costs differentially across all country pairs, the BRI will trigger a reallocation of comparative advantages across countries in a complex way and it will change the share of every trading partner in each country’s aggregate imports and exports basket. While assessing those effects is beyond the scope of this paper,<sup>17</sup> Table 13 shows how different aggregations impact the way one can interpret the results. Both the ranking and the magnitude of the gains are strongly affected by the way the results are aggregated.

> 16 The database contains a variety of useful information and input for researchers such as ad‐valorem equivalents of a shipment day at the sector level.

> 17 Several papers use our data set as input to give predictions regarding changes in trade flows, GDP, FDI or welfare using a variety of methods. See for example de Soyres, Mulabdic and Ruta (2018), Baniya, Rocha and Ruta (2018), Maliszewska, van der Mensbrugghe and Osorio‐Rodarte (2018), Chen (2018) or Bird, Lebrand and Venables (2018).

25
_Table 13: Ranking of countries according to the proportional decrease of its trade costs – based on lower bound scenario._

||**Import weights**|Gains|**Export weights**|Gains|**No weights**|Gains|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|Rank|Country|<br>(%)|Country|<br>(%)|Country|<br>(%)|
|**1**|Cambodia|9.30|Kyrgyzstan|6.01|Rest of Former USSR|6.78|
|**2**|Tajikistan|5.60|Tajikistan|4.54|Cambodia|5.65|
|**3**|Kenya|4.65|Malaysia|4.53|Tajikistan|5.31|
|**4**|Rest of Southeast Asia|4.59|Mauritius|4.25|Kyrgyzstan|4.06|
|**5**|Tanzania|4.54|Cambodia|4.12|Mauritius|3.71|
|**6**|Rest of Former USSR|4.37|Turkey|4.02|Brunei Darussalam|3.66|
|**7**|Azerbaijan|4.34|Pakistan|3.75|Malaysia|3.61|
|**8**|Uganda|4.20|Brunei Darussalam|3.68|Vietnam|3.60|
|**9**|Turkey|4.00|Mongolia|3.60|Tanzania|3.45|
|**10**|Malaysia|3.97|Tanzania|3.59|Turkey|3.16|
|**11**|Bangladesh|3.91|Bangladesh|3.37|Kenya|3.02|
|**12**|Brunei Darussalam|3.69|Rest of Southeast Asia|3.18|Rest of South Asia|2.64|
|**13**|Taiwan, China|3.26|Rest of South Asia|3.01|Uganda|2.58|
|**14**|Mongolia|3.22|Uganda|2.99|Hong Kong SAR, China|2.46|
|**15**|Japan|3.08|Vietnam|2.85|China|2.44|
|**16**|Republic of Korea|2.97|Iran Islamic Republic of|2.72|Taiwan, China|2.42|
|**17**|Mauritius|2.75|Qatar|2.63|Rest of Southeast Asia|2.35|
|**18**|Iran Islamic Republic of|2.74|United Arab Emirates|2.59|Thailand|2.34|
|**19**|Lao PDR|2.56|Kazakhstan|2.43|Rest of East Asia|2.31|
|**20**|Rwanda|2.43|Azerbaijan|2.31|Japan|2.31|

_Note: “Rest of Central Asia” contains Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. “Rest of South Asia” contains Afghanistan, Bhutan and Maldives. “Rest of South East Asia” contains Myanmar and Timor‐Leste. “Rest of Eastern Africa” contains Burundi, Comoros, Djibouti, Eritrea, Mayotte, Seychelles, Somalia and Sudan. “Rest of East Asia” contains the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and China’s Special Administrative Region of Macao._ 26
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Finally, we calculate how much trade costs fall along BRI economic corridors. We find that trade costs would fall by 2.4 percent for the China‐Mongolia‐Russia Economic Corridor (CMREC) and up to 10.2 percent for the China‐Central Asia‐ West Asia Economic Corridor (CCWAEC) in the upper‐bound scenario. All other corridors would fall somewhere in between these two extremes. An important caveat to bear in mind in reading these results is the importance of network effects. Our method, based on a shortest path algorithm on the network of transportation links allows us to take into account all possible interactions between new/upgraded transport projects; and as a result we cannot link the decrease in trade costs of one country to a simple project or even a simple corridor. While these effects are largest along corridors because of the geography of the infrastructure projects, the decreases in shipping time and in trade costs between any two countries depend potentially on the whole set of improvements. More precisely, the gains are not only impacted by the transport projects located in each of those countries, but also by the projects in all countries that are along the shortest path between the origin and destination countries.

# **5. Extensions and complementary policies**

As we have seen in previous sections, transport infrastructures are key elements of the logistic chain and improvement in the transport network can have a significant impact on shipping time and trade costs between countries. However, by focusing only on planned transport projects related to the BRI, we might miss other gains that could be achieved through the BRI. In this section, we now turn to other policies that can affect shipping times over and beyond the improvement of the physical transport infrastructure and focus in particular on two elements: the implementation of trade facilitation policies (proxied by a reduction in the border processing time) and the improvement of corridor management and decrease in congestion (proxied by an speed increase all along economic corridors).

## **a. Trade facilitation**

BRI economies are very heterogenous in terms of their customs policies. Bartley Johns et al. (2018) finds that the trade facilitation performance is below average along BRI corridors. One reason is that the World Trade Organization Trade Facilitation Agreement (WTO‐TFA) – a multilaterally‐agreed set of sound trade facilitation practices – has not been ratified by 5 BRI WTO members and does not apply to further 13 BRI economies that are not WTO members. In this section, we investigate the combined effect of implementing the trade facilitation reforms and improving the transport infrastructure on shipment time and trade cost. In particular, we analyze additional scenarios using GIS network analysis in which import and export border delays for BRI countries are reduced by 50 percent.<sup>_18_</sup> This assumption allows us to understand the potential gains from additional complementary policies.

_Table 14: Trade facilitation scenario, border delays (hours)._

||**East Asia**<br>**& Pacific**|**Europe &**<br>**Central**<br>**Asia**|**Latin**<br>**America &**<br>**Caribbean**<br>**average t**|**Middle**<br>**East &**<br>**North**<br>**Africa**<br>**ime to trad**|**North**<br>**America**<br>**e(hours)**|**South**<br>**Asia**|**Sub‐**<br>**Saharan**<br>**Africa**|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|**Border Delay**|126.96|75.50|122.40|156.87|67.51|166.56|175.47|
|**Reduced Border Delay**|95.61|57.82|109.77|111.32|55.25|102.19|159.43|

18 Data on border compliance are from the World Bank’s Doing Business 2018 report.

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||||**% decrease in**|**time‐trade**|**Lower Bound**|||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|**Baseline**|2.31|1.17|0.50|0.77|0.56|1.90|1.19|
|**Baseline with reduced**<br>**border delays **|3.96|3.60<br>|1.14<br>**% decrease in**|2.80<br>**time‐trade**|1.34<br>**Upper Bound**|6.83|2.99|
|**Baseline**|3.53|2.54|1.92|2.10|2.91|3.44|2.17|
|**Baseline with reduced**<br>**border delays **|5.89|6.04|2.94|6.53|3.94|9.77|4.17|
||||**% decrease i**|**n trade cost L**|**ower Bound**|||
|**Baseline**|1.96|1.01|0.47|0.67|0.50|1.66|1.13|
|**Baseline with reduced**|3.43|3.08|1.08|2.46|1.21|6.22|2.86|
|**border delays **||||||||
||||**% decrease i**|**n trade cost U**|**pper Bound**|||
|**Baseline**|2.95|2.18|1.77|1.84|2.48|2.96|2.05|
|**Baseline with reduced**<br>**border delays **|5.01|5.14|2.74|5.81|3.43|8.77|3.98|

_Note: “Reduced border delay” assumes a 50 percent reduction in import and export delays for BRI countries. Simple average by region across all destinations._ Table 14 presents the results with reduced border delays for BRI countries. In terms of delays, all regions experience a decrease in the average time to cross borders. South Asia experiences the largest reduction in the average time to cross borders, which decreases by 64 hours from 166, followed by Middle East and North Africa. The importance of improvement in custom policies is reflected in the lower and upper bound results for trade costs and time to trade. We find that the percentage decreases in time‐trade and trade costs are three times as large as those in the baseline scenarios. For instance, along BRI corridors the improvements in shipping times would range between 11 percent for the China‐Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and 25.5 percent of the China‐Central Asia‐West Asia Economic Corridor (CCWAEC) in the upper‐bound. Similarly, trade costs would fall by 10.2 percent for the China‐Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and by 21.6 percent for the China‐Central Asia‐West Asia Economic Corridor (CCWAEC) in the upper‐bound scenario. These results show that border delays represent a large component of the overall time it takes to trade and emphasize the importance of complementary policies for reaping the benefits of the BRI.

# **b. Corridor management**

The Belt and Road Initiative is structured around two main components, (i) the Silk Road Economic Belt (SREB), and (ii) the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road (MSR). The “Belt”, in turn, is organized along six economic corridors. As discussed in Kunaka (2018), along with the new and updated infrastructure, management of the transport network along these corridors may improve through a set of complementary policy actions (e.g. harmonization of technical standards, single clearance mechanism). In this section, our goal is to estimate the additional benefits in terms of shipment times and trade costs that can be achieved by improving the overall management of those economic corridors. To implement this in a practical way in our GIS analysis, we run an additional scenario in which the speed of 29
transportation along the entire length of the corridors is increased from 50km/h to 75km/h.<sup>19</sup> We see this assumption as a reasonable first approximation for the improvement in flow and congestion management and the better organization of transport that can be achieved through an overall oversight of the economic corridors.

The overall additional impact of improved corridor management is small. But the impact is significant for some countries in Europe and Central Asia and East Asia and Pacific. Results in Table 15 show that improved corridor management is important for countries in the proximity of the New Eurasian Land Bridge and the China–Central Asia–West Asia Economic Corridors (CCWAEC) such as Kazakhstan and the Kyrgyz Republic. These two countries would gain at least one additional percentage point improvement in the average time‐trade from better corridor management. The benefits from improved corridor management for countries in East Asia and Pacific are smaller as for them border delays represent a large part of the trade cost. The largest impact of improved corridor management would be felt among the countries that lie along the corridor. In the upper‐bound scenario, shipping times would fall by 7 percent in the China‐Mongolia‐Russia Economic Corridor (CMREC) and by up to 20.4 percent for the China‐ Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). The associated change in trade costs would range between 5.1 percent and 17 percent for the China‐Mongolia‐Russia Economic Corridor (CMREC) and the China‐Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), respectively. All other corridors would fall somewhere in between these two extremes.

_Table 15: Improved corridor management scenario, increase in speed along the entire length of the corridors._

||||**% Change ‐ L**<br>|**ower Bound**<br>|<br>||**% Change ‐ U**<br>|**pper Bound**<br>|<br>|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|||time|‐trade|trad|e cost|time|‐trade|tra|de cost|
||||Baseline w/||Baseline w/||Baseline w/||Baseline w/|
|**Country**|Region|Baseline|Corridor<br>Mgmt.|Baseline|Corridor<br>Mgmt.|Baseline|Corridor<br>Mgmt.|Baseline|Corridor<br>Mgmt.|
|**Kyrgyz Republic**|Europe & Central Asia|4.09|5.24|4.08|5.23|8.26|8.62|8.24|8.60|
|**Armenia**|Europe & Central Asia|1.14|2.23|1.14|2.22|1.53|5.04|1.52|5.02|
|**Kazakhstan**|Europe & Central Asia|1.74|2.79|1.72|2.76|5.63|9.59|5.56|9.48|
|**Mongolia**|East Asia & Pacific|2.28|3.10|2.27|3.09|4.28|6.67|4.26|6.64|
|**Russia**|Europe & Central Asia|0.88|1.42|0.84|1.36|2.35|4.68|2.25|4.47|
|**Belarus**|Europe & Central Asia|0.92|1.36|0.90|1.33|3.82|6.32|3.74|6.19|
|**Turkey**|Europe & Central Asia|3.36|3.62|3.14|3.38|3.82|6.19|3.57|5.78|
|**China**|East Asia & Pacific|2.55|2.74|2.42|2.60|3.65|5.14|3.47|4.88|
|**Thailand**|East Asia & Pacific|2.46|2.60|2.34|2.47|4.21|6.02|4.01|5.72|
|**Hong**<br>**Kong**<br>**SAR,**<br>**China**|East Asia & Pacific|2.49|2.63|2.45|2.59|2.84|4.80|2.79|4.72|
|**Canada**|North America|0.84|0.94|0.80|0.90|3.65|7.84|3.50|7.49|
|**Honduras**|Latin America & Caribbean|0.72|0.78|0.71|0.77|2.35|6.42|2.32|6.34|
|**Jamaica**|Latin America & Caribbean|0.76|0.81|0.75|0.80|2.26|5.82|2.23|5.79|
|**Bulgaria**|Europe & Central Asia|0.89|0.93|0.85|0.89|2.09|6.48|2.01|6.22|
|**Dominican Republic**|Latin America & Caribbean|0.79|0.82|0.78|0.81|2.27|5.96|2.23|5.87|
|**Romania**|Europe & Central Asia|0.93|0.96|0.90|0.93|2.55|6.00|2.46|5.79|
|**Bangladesh**|South Asia|1.79|1.81|1.75|1.77|2.19|7.20|2.15|7.05|
|**Azerbaijan**|Europe & Central Asia|2.15|2.16|2.13|2.14|2.93|7.41|2.91|7.34|

_Note: Simple average by country across all destinations (countries with largest percentage point differences)_

> 19 To stress the difference with the scenarios discussed in Sections 3 and 4, note that in that exercise the increase in speed is only along the segments that are either new or upgraded.

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# **6. Conclusion**

This paper studies the effects of the Belt and Road Initiative on shipment times and trade costs for countries that are along the Belt and Road as proposed by China and for the world more broadly. The analysis combines detailed new information on transport infrastructure projects planned as part of the BRI, a GIS network model to precisely quantify the impact of these projects on shipping times, and estimates of the value of time from Hummels and Schaur (2013) to calculate the ad valorem equivalent reductions in trade costs. The key finding is that the Belt and Road Initiative can substantially reduce shipment times and trade costs for BRI economies (up to 3.2 and 2.8 percent, respectively) and for the world as a whole (up to 2.5 and 2.2 percent, respectively).

The main contribution of the paper is in the new methodology used to quantify changes in trade costs due to transport projects and the two novel databases that provide detailed information on BRI‐induced changes in shipment times and trade costs for the world and for BRI economies. These data, in particular, will help researchers interested in better understanding the impact of the Belt and Road Initiative on a number of economic variables, including growth, trade, foreign investment, or the allocation of economic activity. The data may also be useful to investigate the systemic effects of BRI projects on non‐economic variables such as air pollution or biodiversity or on social outcomes, such as the changes in poverty for certain groups in specific geographic locations.

Admittedly, this is a first look at the effects of the BRI on shipment times and trade costs and more research will be needed. First, on the data side, information on infrastructure projects linked to the Belt and Road Initiative will change ‐and, most likely, improve‐ over time. Second, on the methodological side, research may attempt to precisely model the choice between transport modes and how this choice is affected by BRI infrastructure projects. These developments would allow to improve the network analysis and provide more precise estimates.

Finally, this paper does not address two sets of important questions. First, we take BRI planned projects as given and do not investigate what network of infrastructure would maximize efficiency (in terms of reduction of shipment times and trade costs) for the set of BRI economies or the world. Second, we look at the impact of the infrastructure projects linked to the Belt and Road Initiative as a whole and do not attempt to identify the effects on shipment times and trade costs for, say, individual overland corridors such as the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) or individual projects, such as the Gwadar Port. While the tools developed in this paper would help address these issues, both questions are left for future research.

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