Transportation in the East: The Key to Trade between the Two Europes

Now at the moment of the upheavals in Eastern Europe, which should accelerate the development of economic relations between the two parts of our continent, the transportation sector will play a prime role. The authors analyze first the evolution of the organization and the infrastructure of transportation over the past twenty years and its present situation. The transportation network, generally speaking, is underdeveloped, although the volume has considerably increased For example, shipment of goods increased from 3,673 billion to 6,794 billion tons/km in the USSR and from 26.1 billion to 46.2 billion tons/km in Hungary between 1970 and 1988. Cooperation within the CMEA and with Yugoslavia, which is, we should recall, an observer, has been affected in a number of joint projects. It is managed by bodies such as the Organization of Cooperation of Railways, the Maritime Company of the CMEA, etc. Some major projects have been financed by the different countries: oil pipelines and gas pipelines from the huge Siberian deposits to Europe in the East, segments of railways making it possible to send goods from the USSR into the different countries of Eastern Europe without transferring the load, and also reclamation works on the Danube which, together with the Rhine-Main-Danube canals and the Danube-Black Sea canal already in operation, will link Rotterdam with the Black Sea over river waterways. To these projects one must add the north-south motorway, financed in part by the UNPD, a major portion of which will cross the countries we are studying in this article. The second part of the study contains a more detailed analysis of each of the national transportation networks. Rail, which still makes up the lion's share in certain countries: Poland (69 percent of commerce), GDR (61.6 percent), and Czechoslovakia (43.8 percent) has some very serious problems in Romania as well as in the USSR because of the dilapidated state of the network and the rolling stock. In recent months, breakdowns have brought about a disorganization of entire sectors of the Soviet economy. However, Czechoslovakia seems to have some good chances in this sector if it modernizes its equipment. Road transportation still plays a marginal role. The network is too inadequate, and motorways are almost nonexistent except in the former GDR However, Bulgaria has the largest trucking company in Europe. Transportation by pipelines has undergone vigorous growth. Riverway and river-ocean transportation still play a minor role: their share of commerce varies from 4.8 percent in Czechoslovakia to 0.4 percent in Poland Several countries of the region are major maritime powers, such as the USSR as well as Yugoslavia, which ships 81 percent of its goods by sea. Transportation in Eastern Europe is surely destined to play a major role in the free zones that have already been established or are projected in the various countries of the region. The present study is illustrated with a number of tables. A list of essential needs for shipping materials in the East and an interview with a French shipper about East-West freight practices round off this report.