<div> <div> <div> <span>Russian rivers famously ‘go the wrong way.’ The United States and Canada have the supremely beneficial hydrography of the interconnected Great Lakes system and the </span><span>Mississippi, and Europe has the Rhine, Elbe, Danube, and Dnieper inland waterways giving even landlocked states such as Switzerland and Austria direct access to the ocean and the </span><span>favourable cost-savings that maritime transport brings to trade. But for Kazakhstan, one Russia river does ‘go the right way.’ The Ob’Irtysh river system penetrates deep into the heart of Eurasia from the Arctic Ocean. </span> <p><span><br></span></p> <p><span>The development on Kazakhstan’s inland waterways though is extremely undeveloped. Kazakhstan has over 4,000 kms of navigable inland waterways, comparable with the Western European industrialised economies of Germany and France. Kazakhstan could never rival a state like the Netherlands for interconnected networked inland waterways, </span><span>but the natural geography presented is similar to Switzerland on the Rhine or Austria on </span><span>the Danube: land-locked developed economies with access to the global ocean. </span></p> <p><span>China’s Belt and Road </span><span>in the CAREC economies has come with media hype on the benefits of the shorter transit times offered by the China Rail Express intercontinental rail corridors connecting China and Europe via either Russia or the Black Sea. The policy argument is that there is sufficient demand for goods with transport time-needs shorter than maritime but cheaper than air freight. </span></p> </div> </div> </div>