*2.2.1.3. Infrastructure*

As seen from the development of urban areas, transport infrastructure will necessarily accelerate the expansion of urban land‐use and is one of the primary driving forces of urban expansion [70]. Chen and Xia [71] also reported that a cross‐regional high‐speed rail network had greatly advanced China's urban development. In this study, we therefore presented a qualitative analysis of the impact of railways in the Indochinese Peninsula on urbanization during the period from 2000 to 2015. **Figure 7** shows existing, under construction, and planned/ potential railways in countries of the Indochinese Peninsula in 2012. These data were obtained from the GMS Core Environment Program of ADB and were developed based on the Inter‐ national Vector Data and ADB maps [72]. These data provided the state of the railways in the Indochinese Peninsula around 2012 for academic research.

#### *2.2.1.4. Foreign economic and trade relations*

According to the econometric analysis by Huff and Angeles [73], in some Southeast Asian countries, the measures of globalization are more predictive of urbanization than domestic factors. Increasingly, the five countries in the Indochinese Peninsula are linked with the global economy through both trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) [74], and their increased outward orientation toward regional and global markets was regarded as a key contributing factor to the rapid growth during the 2000s [75]. To present a comprehensive analysis of the driving forces for urban expansion in this region, the FDI inward data and Total Merchandise Exports (TME) data were used in this chapter; they were designed to investigate the impact of foreign economic and trade relations on the region's urbanization. These two data sets were obtained from the GMS Statistics data set on the ADB Website [66], and the source of their data was the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTD) [76]. **Figure 8** shows the FDI inward (a) and TME (b) for the five countries in the region.

**Figure 8.** Map showing the FDI inward to Myanmar, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and Laos for the period from 2001 to 2013 **(a)** and TME of the five countries for the period from 2001 to 2014 **(b)**.

In addition, as a neighboring country, China has played an important role in the economic development for the five countries of the Indochinese Peninsula; in GMS, according to Poncet [77], there has been a high degree of trade linkage between China's Yunnan Province and its neighboring countries (Laos, Myanmar, and Vietnam) based on the development of a gravity model of trade. In recent years, China's outward investments in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have increased in spite of an overall global decline in FDI because of the 2008 financial crisis [78]. For this reason, China is to believed to have immense influence on the economic development in the Indochinese Peninsula. Therefore, a statistical analysis of UP (% of total), FDI from China to the five countries, and foreign trade with China was also performed in this study. FDI from China to the five countries for the period from 2003 to 2013 was used in this chapter; the data were extracted from China's Outward FDI of 2010 and 2013 [79, 80]. Data for gross imports and exports (GIE) with China for the period from 2000 to 2010 were obtained from World Integrated Trade Solution (WITS) because data from 2011 to 2015 were not obtained in China. **Figure 9** shows the FDI flowing to the five countries from China (a) for the period from 2003 to 2013 and GIE between China and the five countries (b) for the period from 2000 to 2010.

**Figure 9.** Map showing the FDI from China to Myanmar, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and Laos for the period from 2003 to 2013 **(a)** and GIE between China and those countries for the period from 2000 to 2010 **(b)**.
