ABSTRACT
An implementation of the International Freight Simultaneous Transportation Equilibrium Model (IFSTEM) that developed in United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), to the goods trade through the ports and lands of Sultanate of Oman is presented. Although some socio-economic variables, which are not available, were required for IFSTEM model calibration, some reasonable assumptions were made and it was good enough to draw the following main findings: the proposed alternative enhancement scenarios were 4 nested scenarios, i.e., each scenario included the previous one plus an additional enhancement. Scenario 1 involved reducing the number of documents from 8 to 4, and scenario 2 involved scenarios 1 plus reducing the time for port and terminal handling to 1 day (instead of 2 days for imports and 3 days for exports as estimated for 2012 by the World Bank trading across borders report 2013). Scenario 3 involved scenarios 1 and 2 plus reducing the international maritime transport times and costs by 20% (i.e., to become equal to that of the United Arab Emirate (UAE) according to the application assumptions), and scenario 4 involved scenarios 1 and 2 plus reducing the international maritime transport times and costs by 40% (i.e., to become 20% less than that of UAE according to the application assumptions). These 4 enhancement scenarios were analyzed against and compared with scenario (0), i.e., the reference “Do nothing” scenario.The prediction results revealed that the estimated international trade flows (imports, exports and re-exports) for Oman for scenarios 4 would increase by more than 504% by 2040 ( i.e., around 187 million tons) compared to the present situation of the base year 2012 (i.e., around 37 million tons). This increase would represent around 70% compared to the “do nothing” reference scenario by the year 2040 (i.e., around 110 million tons) assuming that the average increase of international trade flows in the “do nothing” case would be around 4% annually during the analysis period from 2012 to 2040. The predictions of average total trip time and total cost per ton revealed an estimated decrease for scenario 4 compared to the reference scenario by around 25% and 20% respectively. These results are internally consistent and represented reasonably significant improvements compared to the “Do nothing” reference scenario.