Development Status and Future Trends for Eurasian Container Land Bridge Transport

Olli-Pekka Hilmola, Weidong Li and Yulia Panova
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Olli-Pekka Hilmola: Kouvola Unit, LUT University, Tykkitie 1, FIN-45100 Kouvola, Finland
Weidong Li: School of Economics & Management, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China
Yulia Panova: Department of E-Commerce, Luoyang Normal University, Luoyang 471934, China

Logistics, 2021, vol. 5, issue 1, 1-12

Abstract: For decades, trade between Europe and China has grown consistently, which has resulted in increased container transportation volumes. Such transportation has been dominated by sea-based options. However, over the years, an air-based mode of transport was developed, while it has lately become increasingly popular to use railways utilizing the Trans-Siberian land bridge. This latter approach boomed amid the COVID-19 crisis in 2020. However, the railway container boom in Eurasia has deeper roots than just the COVID-19 era. As is illustrated in this research work, international trade containers (trade between Russia and other countries, mostly China) and transit containers (e.g., serving the Chinese–EU route) were already showing some significance as early as 2003–2004. In 2020, their volume was already measured in the millions, regardless of the railway data source being used. This is well above the starting period in the 1980s and 1990s, when total annual volumes were around 0.1 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU). Container capacity has developed over the years, first being used for international trade and only lately for transit. As a preliminary comparison to air freight, the growth rate was roughly double that in the two-decade observation period.

Keywords: container volumes; analysis; Europe; Asia; railways; air; sea (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L8 L80 L81 L86 L87 L9 L90 L91 L92 L93 L98 L99 M1 M10 M11 M16 M19 R4 R40 R41 R49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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