Rioux Bertrand, Galkin Philipp, Murphy Frederic, Pierru Axel

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The fast pace of development in China’s coal industry created bottlenecks in its transportation infrastructure. These bottlenecks likely affected not only China’s domestic coal market, but also global coal markets. In this paper, we estimate the costs and consequences of these bottlenecks using a production and multimodal transportation model. We find that coal transportation inefficiencies increased the price of Chinese domestic coal at coastal locations and thereby influenced global seaborne coal prices. Many projects that expanded transport capacity delivered strongly positive rates of return. However, some have poor or negative rates of return, which can reflect either overinvestment or preinvestment in future needs.