Abstract
Egypt has proposed a new development corridor. A main component is a desert-based expansion of the current highway network. This network is founded on a 1200-kilometer north-south route that starts at a proposed new port near El-Alemein and runs parallel to the Nile Valley to the border of Sudan. It also includes 21 east-west branches that connect the main axis to densely populated cities on the Nile. The paper is a first attempt at an economic assessment of the impact of this proposed corridor. It uses an interregional computable general equilibrium (CGE) model developed and reported in a prior paper. Here, that model is integrated with a more detailed geo-coded transportation network model to help quantify the spatial effects of transportation cost change due specifically to changes in accessibility induced by the corridor. The paper focuses on the likely structural economic impacts that such a large investment in transportation could enable through a series of simulations related to the operational phase of the project.