The World Bank's China mission announced in Beijing Wednesday that the bank's Board of Executive Directors approved a loan to China Tuesday totaling 100 million US dollars to help finance the Inner Mongolia Transport and Trade Corridor Project.

The bank said it loan will be used to spur and sustain the development of China's cross-border trade between China on one hand and Russia and Mongolia on the other by improving transport infrastructure and logistics.

These improvements, in turn, will lower transport costs, increase income from external trade, and raise income in Inner Mongolia, the country's third-largest region at the provincial level and one of the poorest provincial areas in the country's northern and western region, the bank said in a press

release.

The project is designed to maximize the use of transport infrastructure to promote international trade through Inner Mongolia in general and the Hulunbeier League in particular, said the bank.

The bank acknowledged that it will help accelerate the general development of the Hulunbeier League, preparing it to cope with the increasingly vital role the central government has assigned to it as the country's main contact point for trading with Russia.

The project aims to improve the capacity of transport infrastructure and network planning to handle the significant increase in the volume of international freight traffic along China's northeastern border and to develop a freight transfer and trade facilitation program to meet the growing demand for cross-border trade.

The bank will also provide technical assistance to the Inner Mongolia Communications Department (IMCD) and Hulunbeier to "build their capacity to plan, facilitate and manage growing demand for transportation of international trade traffic."

Supee Teravaninthorn, World Bank Task Manager for the Project, said "the task team from the Bank and our colleagues in Inner Mongolia and Hulunbeir Leagues are excited about the project, which is the first in China that is comprehensive in dealing with the logistic and trade aspect of the transport issue, apart from the transport infrastructure itself."

The Inner Mongolia Transport and Trade Facilitation Project includes the expansion of highway capacity by upgrading or building about 177 km of Hailar-Manzhouli Highway, and upgrading and rehabilitation of about 435 km of the highway network, sections, which have been identified either as key links for international trade facilitation at smaller border crossings with Russia and Mongolia, or as critical missing links in the highway network. The project also aims to improve transport access to four other seasonal land ports between China and Russia and China and Mongolia.

The bank said the loan for the Inner Mongolia Transport and Trade Corridor Project has a maturity of 20 years, including a five-year grace period.

Source: Xinhua