BAKU, Azerbaijan, Apr.5
By Sadraddin Aghjayev – Trend:
Azerbaijan entered the new stage of transport policy development in 2020, Russian political and economic expert Alexander Karavayev told Trend.
According to Karavayev, this policy began to bring the first results after the signing of the decree on the establishment of the Azerbaijan Investment Holding and the transfer of a number of state transport companies to its subordination.
The expert said that the policy of the newly appointed Minister of Transport, Communications and High Technologies Rashad Nabiyev is to transfer powers to manage transport companies to the state through the creation of supervisory boards in Azerbaijan Railways, Azerbaijan Airlines and the Azerbaijan Caspian Shipping Company.
"The advantage of Azerbaijan in land cargo transportation was clearly expressed back in the Soviet Union. The strategic-nodal characteristics of Azerbaijan were laid back in Soviet times, which gave it a further impetus in the implementation of such ideas as the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars and the North-South International Transport Corridor," he noted.
Karavayev stressed that over the past 20 years, Azerbaijan has achieved great success in the transport sector.
"All transport companies operating today were optimized, investments were made in port infrastructure, pipeline transport (Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan), which unloaded the capacities of the railways,” he pointed out. “All these communications, in which Azerbaijan invested, made it possible for all types of transport to develop. However, this development did not stake on global transit, it, first of all, stimulated development of local economy.”
Besides, according to him, the planned unified transport strategy will oversee new realities for movement in two directions.
"The first direction is attracting international cargo to its regional segment. This isn’t an easy task, since Azerbaijan controls only a part of the international section,” said the expert. “However its development can be facilitated by Azerbaijan's introduction of electronic document management, which will reduce the time spent at border points and a number of other relevant operations. The second direction of the transport sector’s development is to use the potential of the local or regional economy in the field of introducing new types of exports from the territory of Azerbaijan.”
As a result of the liberation of the territories from Armenian occupation during the 44-day war from late Sept. through early Nov.2020, according to Karavayev, Azerbaijan may have a demand for expanding the export of mining resources, especially copper, as well as the export of gold.
Besides, the expert reminded that the leadership of the railways of Azerbaijan and Russia in 2019 discussed the issue of cooperation in the field of container transportation.
"The idea was to supply our goods to China. At the moment, the country supplies its export and transit goods to our countries, as well as to European countries in transit through our countries. Using the capacities of the Russian railways and the Far East ports, Azerbaijan can export its goods to the ports of the Southeast Asian countries, including China," said Karavayev.
He also added that in order to develop the logistics industry, Azerbaijan should create a large company for road cargo shipments.
"Azerbaijan can provide road cargo shipments to Russia and Iran, as well as other countries that could request such shipments," concluded the expert.
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