Question

A not-so-popular Bridge
It was not quite what the planners had in mind when Ghana and Togo opened their expensive bridge across the Ghana-Togo Border in January. After an early boost from summer tourism, car crossings have fallen sharply, while trains now connecting Lome, the Togolese capital, and Takoradi, Ghana’s third city, are struggling to run on time. Many people think the costs of using the bridge are simply too high. And, from the point of view of West African solidarity, the traffic is embarrassingly one-sided: far more Ghanaians are going to Togo than vice versa. So last week the authorities decided to knock almost 50% off the price of a one-way crossing for the next three months of this year.
The two governments, which paid nearly $2 billion for the 16km (10-mile) state-owned bridge-cum-tunnel, reckoned that, above all, it would strengthen economic ties across the border and create, within a few years, one of the fastest-growing and richest regions in Africa. But ministers on both sides of the water, especially in Ghana, have been getting edgy about the bridge’s teething problems. Last month Katanka, Ghana’s trade minister, called for a tariff review: the cost of driving over the bridge, at $26.40 each way, was too high to help integrate the region’s two bits.
Businessmen have been complaining too. Togoko, a Togolese drug firm which moved its West African marketing activities to Takoradi to take advantage of ‘the bridge effect’, has been urging Togolese staff to limit their trips to Takoradi by working more from home. Ghanamo, a Ghanaian furniture chain with
EXAMINER: R. T. OPOKU

headquarters in Togo, has banned its employees from using the bridge altogether when travelling on company business, and has told them to make their crossings – more cheaply if a lot more slowly – by ferry. The people managing the bridge consortium say they always expected a dip in car traffic from a fall peak of 20,000 vehicles a day. But they admit that the current daily flow of 6,000 vehicles or so must increase if the bridge is to pay its way in the long run. So they are about to launch a new advertising campaign. And they are still upbeat about the overall trend: commercial traffic is indeed going up. The trains have carried more than one million passengers since the service began in January.
Certainly, the bridge is having some effect. Many more Ghanaians are visiting the art galleries and cafe ́s of Lome; more Togolese are nipping northwards over the bridge. Some 75% more people crossed the bridge in the first two months after the bridge’s opening than during the same period a year before.
Other links are being forged too. Takoradi’s Kasatoa and Lome’s Gossiper newspapers now produce a joint Newspaper supplement every day, while cross-border ventures in health, education and information technology have begun to bear fruit. Joint cultural ventures are also under way.
And how about linking eastern Togo more directly with Nigeria’s Legos coastline through Cotonou, enabling Togolese to go by train from their capital to Lagos in, say, three hours?
Required
a. Explain why the demand for the bridge is likely to be price-elastic.
b. If the Ghana government estimates that the price elasticity is -1.4, calculate the effect on traffic
using the bridge, stating any assumptions.
c. Why is the calculation above not likely to give an accurate forecast for the long term?

Answer 1