Countries that depend on transit trade, notably the landlocked countries, are confronted with a variety of practical constraints that increase the logistics costs of their international trade. For example, it is estimated that landlocked developing countries have to bear, on average, 50 per cent higher international transport costs than their neighbouring transit/coastal countries. The specific constraints are related to Customs and border procedures and also to the fact that cargo and transport services have to adapt to different sets of administrative, legal, commercial and other conditions when passing through a third country. Transit arrangements that aim at diminishing these constraints need to take new developments into account, notably concerning trade facilitation, new technologies, multimodal transport, and transport security. In order to develop and implement specific transit arrangements, the public and private sectors of the transit country and of the landlocked country need to cooperate within each country and between the two countries through appropriate national and regional coordination mechanisms. In many cases, corridor-specific arrangements can be found that lead to win-win situations, where both countries can benefit from synergies and economies of scale in investments and transport operations.
