The Regional Balkans Infrastructure Study Update : Enhancing Regional Connectivity, Identifying Impediments and Priority Remedies
In an effort to further develop the South East Europe transport observatory (SEETO) comprehensive network, integrate it in the European Union’s (EU) Trans-European transport (TEN-T) network and strengthen the underlying transport planning systems, a grant was awarded by the Western Balkans infrastructure framework (WBIF) for the update of the regional Balkans infrastructure study (REBIS). The motivation for the update was the fact that since the completion of REBIS in 2003, there had been no review or update of the study’s projections and recommendations that will in turn enable an informed assessment and updating of the regional priorities for investment in the SEETO comprehensive network. The main objective of the REBIS update was to develop a priority action plan for enhancing the efficiency of the SEETO comprehensive network. The action plan identifies priority physical investments as well as non-physical improvements including regulatory, institutional, and managerial changes required to reduce impediments to the efficient performance of the network. The focus of the final report is the assessment of the 2030 traffic projections under low and moderate and moderate and high economic growth scenarios against the capacity of the network under the do-nothing scenario and the full SEETO scenario and on the development of the priority action plan. The report is organized as follows: section one gives introduction .Section two presents a brief assessment of the 2003 REBIS traffic projections against reported counts. Section three presents key non-physical impediments to transport and trade facilitation, as well as the costs and benefits associated with their alleviation. Section four presents the 2030 traffic projections for both the low and moderate and moderate and high economic growth scenarios. Section five presents the results of the capacity assessment of the existing and planned networks to handle the projected traffic. Section six presents the methodology used in the preliminary economic efficiency analysis for assessing the physical interventions and the results, while section seven presents the priority action plan. Section eight provides concluding comments.