Transport

Yangon Port is in some ways still decidedly 19th-century. Cargo handling is manual and paperwork old-fashioned – a shipper must submit copies of each document to three separate offices. There is no single window and no electronic reporting. Bills of lading are inaccessible online and tracking is done by hand, making it hard to know the precise...

Despite years of isolation and despite being a relatively poor country, Myanmar has a surprisingly developed transportation network. It has 66 airports, eight airlines, more than 5500 km of rail and about 150,000 km of roads. Some of it is no doubt historic. The first railway line was installed in 1877 by the British and by the Japanese invasion...

When it was announced in August 2013 that a South Korean consortium had won the tender to build the new Hanthawaddy International Airport, Myanmar’s opening to the world gained critical momentum. The airport, which is scheduled to open in 2018, is a badly needed hunk of infrastructure. To sustain the country’s current pace of progress in...

Soon Myanmar will have a dozen airlines. That is quite a few operators for a country with 1.6m passengers a year, the same number of passengers as Macao, Azerbaijan and Malta. Indeed, Thailand, a country that serves 35m passengers annually, has fewer airlines than Myanmar. To be sure, most of the Myanmar carriers have just a few small planes....

After years of underinvestment in transportation infrastructure, due to embargoes, insurgencies, regional autonomy and mixed relations with neighbours, Myanmar is an exceedingly hard place to reach overland, much less transit. The country has essentially been cut off from the world, with small isolated border gates as its only surface...