FT story on "rail renaissance" in SE Asia. Driver? "There is a realisation that they should do more to tap into intra-regional trade." So says a UN RR expert out of Bangkok.
Why must they do more?
SE Asia sees writing on wall: the region as a whole cannot rely on Europe and America to same degree on export-driven growth. So, to keep up with networking China, SE Asia, which has talked about a common market by 2015 but done little to do it (why bother when the export-driven growth remains hot?), now feels some real urgency to begin. Infrastructure is considered the big bottleneck.
Hence the $2.2B investment plan so the region's RR consists of more than just that coastal line that wraps around.
Goal is to make consumer goods travel better through SE Asia, cut down supply chain costs to rest of world, and open up another land bridge route between China and India--more to the latter's east coast than the current one. On all routes, the RR vision competes with paved roads, but the logic overall is, the more the merrier.
Some will look at this and see "regionalism replaces globalization!" But in truth, we're talking about a filling-in-the-blanks dynamic long overdue. If anything, this is globalization spreading far deeper and more pervasively across the region, because all this intra-regional connectivity allows everybody more rapid access to everybody else.