Tony managed to find data on the cost of transporting a container from ports in the United States and Europe to capital cities around the world. Sure enough, cities that were the capitals of landlocked countries incurred much higher transport costs. However, the big surprise was that the costs varied enormously in ways that did not seem to depend upon distance. Tony eventually tracked this down. The transport costs for a landlocked country depended upon how much its coastal neighbor had spent on transport infrastructure. One way of thinking about this was that landlocked countries were
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