Abstract
The article examines the strategic partnership in the development of the Eurasian transcontinental transport corridor system, as well as in the Republic of Kazakhstan and the People’s Republic of China. Special focus has been placed on the Kazakhstani section of the Middle Corridor (Trans-Caspian International Transport Route) – a multilateral, multimodal route connecting Chinese and European marketplaces through Kazakhstan and the Caspian Sea. The aim of the work is to determine how the mechanisms of synergy of infrastructure (infrastructure synergies) and factors defining corridor sustainability are determined using World Bank data (WITS, Logistics Performance Index), analytical material of international organizations, and scientific papers registered in Scopus. The article states that “physical” investments in railway, port, and terminal infrastructure can only yield long-term economic benefits if they are accompanied by trade facilitation, the electronic integration of all procedures, and the formation of institutional corridor governance structures. It has also been demonstrated that the primary restriction in the Middle Corridor is the extreme variability in transit times and costs; this restriction occurs in the majority of cases at intermodal nodes and border crossing points. Therefore, the authors propose a framework for developing corridors based on services, in which priorities are established end-to-end using indicators of logistics service reliability, and transit nodes are converted into logistics and industrial clusters. The practical importance of the research lies in substantiating the direction for Kazakhstan’s investment policies and forms of cooperation with China to reduce delays, increase predictability, and increase domestic value-added.