📋 Tender Overview
This is the third in a special series of articles to commemorate the 50th Year of ASEAN-Japan Friendship and Cooperation. The series is meant to reflect on the trust and development that Japan and JICA have built with ASEAN and the future of their partnership. In this article, we will focus on the connectivity that is crucial for the development of ASEAN as a unified region, and its growth along with that of Japan. JICA staff and others traveled along the Southern Economic Corridor, a major economic artery that connects the countries of ASEAN, exploring the current state of connectivity and the challenges that must be addressed to strengthen it.
Stimulating cross-border traffic through enhanced connectivity
The Southern Economic Corridor, a major transportation and logistics artery, traverses approximately 1,000 kilometers from Viet Nam to Cambodia, Thailand, and Myanmar in the southern part of the Indochina Peninsula. JICA, together with the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the World Bank, has been cooperating for more than 20 years in the development of the roads and bridges that comprise the corridor’s infrastructure. This effort is aimed at improving connectivity within the region and facilitating the movement of people and goods across national borders.
One way to measure a region's connectivity is to look at the movement of traffic across borders via economic corridors. How is the cooperation in strengthening connectivity (which is indispensable for ASEAN's development) really functioning, and what are the future challenges? This October, JICA staff and related experts made the journey along the 900-km Southern Economic Corridor from Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam, through Phnom Penh, Cambodia, to Bangkok, Thailand. They visited companies and industrial parks operating along the corridor, and explored the current status and the challenges of connectivity within the ASEAN region, including road development, trade facilitation, and business development.
Physical connectivity has been making a significant impact
Koizumi Yukihiro, Deputy Director General, Infrastructure Management Department, has been involved in many infrastructure development projects. He described the current status of Cambodia’s National Route 1, which Japan has been supporting through JICA since 2000. “Along the corridor, which connects the Vietnamese border with the capital city of Phnom Penh, there were many trucks loaded with containers and international buses,” he says. “I witnessed a dramatic increase in logistics and traffic between the two countries of Viet Nam and Cambodia.”
Koizumi says that the travel time from Ho Chi Minh City to Phnom Penh has been reduced from what used to take about 12 hours in 2001 to six hours today. “The renovation of National Road No.5, which connects Phnom Penh to the Thai border (which Japan has been supporting since 2013), is almost complete*1 with two lanes on each side of the road,” he says. “Previously, the section from Phnom Penh to Battambang took about eight hours, if traveling at 30 kilometers per hour. Now, it is possible to travel smoothly at the specified speed of 90 kilometers per hour. The new road has had a significant effect on reducing the travel time.”
* 1 Given that approximately 90% of JICA’s cooperation project has been completed, a completion ceremony for National Road No.5 was held on November 22, attended by Prime Minister Hun Manet of Cambodia.
Koizumi says that Cambodia's Tsubasa Bridge over the Mekong River, completed with Japanese assistance in 2015, has significantly increased transport capacity, which has risen from approximately 5,000 vehicles (passenger car unit: PCU) per day by ferry, the sole means of crossing before the bridge was built, to around 15,000 vehicles (PCU) per day since the bridge's opening. The physical connectivity between the two countries has improved dramatically and the traffic between Viet Nam and Cambodia, and between Cambodia and Thailand, has increased. On the other hand, Koizumi points out that the Southern Economic Corridor as a whole, even with the three countries of Viet Nam, Cambodia, and Thailand working together to expand the flow of goods and people, is not functioning adequately. One factor contributing to this is the fact that the customs clearance procedures, including complex cross-border procedures, have not progressed as expected.
