This study examines the relationship between maritime freight costs and consumer price inflation, and the role of freight linkage, using a panel dataset covering 141 countries between 2006 and 2022. Freight costs are represented by the Baltic Dry Index (BDI) and, in an alternative model, the Freightos Baltic Global Container Index (FBX). Freight linkage is measured using the UNCTAD Container Transport Linkage Index (LSCI). Since both freight indices are global rather than country-specific, descriptive variation is time-series in nature; therefore, estimates should be interpreted as robust predictive relationships rather than structurally defined transition elasticities. In this context, the findings show that concurrent freight cost effects on inflation are statistically insignificant, while lagged effects are both economically and statistically significant. A 10% increase in freight costs is associated with an approximate 0.19–0.22 percentage point increase in consumer prices in the following year. The results are robust across different model specifications and freight indices, and sectoral decomposition and lag profile analysis are consistent with a lagged transmission channel (though not a unique diagnostic method). Higher maritime connectivity in advanced economies is associated with lower inflation, but this relationship becomes irrelevant for developing economies after controlling for trade openness.
Using a panel of Chinese cities from 1999 to 2018, this study examines how foreign direct investment (FDI) and road infrastructure jointly influence local economic growth. Within a human-capital-augmented Solow framework, the analysis shows that FDI is positively associated with growth in GDP per capita, and that this relationship strengthens when cities possess more extensive road networks. The results suggest that transportation infrastructure facilitates the diffusion of technologies and productivity spillovers introduced by foreign firms, thereby amplifying the growth effects of FDI. The complementary interaction between FDI and road infrastructure is most evident in technology-intensive cities, coastal regions, and top-tier urban areas. Multiple robustness checks, including alternative specifications and estimation approaches, support the consistency of these findings.
Community Transport (CT) provides essential mobility for vulnerable populations but remains financially fragile due to misaligned funding. In Australia, prevailing flat-rate subsidies fail to cover true “care-embedded” service costs, which vary significantly by geography, client complexity, and trip distance. Addressing the challenge of designing cost-reflective paratransit subsidies, we utilize a unique mixed-methods dataset—combining financial audits from 31 CT operators with operational telemetry for 175,000 trips—to estimate a transparent, benchmarked cost function. Our analysis reveals a severe structural deficit: the volume-weighted mean cost per trip (AUD 67.50) nearly doubles the current subsidy. Furthermore, we unmask a “rural cost paradox” where lower rural labour costs obscure significant capital burdens. To resolve this, we derive a National Variable Pricing Formula structured as a two-part tariff, featuring a fixed base flag-fall and a distance-based variable rate, supplemented by verifiable premiums for high-needs clients and remote capital. Simulations demonstrate this schedule increases the sector-wide cost recovery ratio from 52% to full sustainability, enabling most operators (25 of 31) to achieve 80% target solvency without incentivizing cost inflation. This study provides the first empirical cost analysis of CT, offering a transferable blueprint for transitioning to sustainable, activity-based transport subsidies.
The examination of contractual aspects, including rigid terms and incentives, in the outcomes of concessions has been studied across various economic sectors worldwide. Despite positive results reported in the literature, particularly regarding the enhancement of operational efficiency in infrastructure, gaps remain in understanding the factors contributing to the success or failure of concessions within the airport industry. The Brazilian context reveals instances of both commendable and detrimental practices in enduring contracts, establishing a link between contractual variables and resulting outcomes. This study aims to illuminate contractual elements concerning the devolution of airports granted in Brazil, highlighting problematic instances and successful practices. An examination of contracts spanning ten years, considering various times and situations, suggests the presence of rigid clauses that hinder operators' adaptability to external changes, such as the pandemic, and others that foster inefficiency or the return of assets. The subsequent analysis correlates contractual and external factors to elucidate the duration of the contracts. In conclusion, this study identifies that auction duration is primarily driven by competition levels and regulatory rounds. We propose drafting adjustments, such as standardized learning clauses and competition filters, to mitigate the risk of aggressive bidding and prevent future undesired asset returns.
Vehicle miles traveled is a key policy variable because it is strongly associated with greenhouse gas emissions and the spatial structure of urban environments, including density and land-use diversity. Policies that promote higher density and more diverse land use are often expected to reduce VMT by encouraging non-motorized travel. However, this relationship remains inconclusive and may generate unintended consequences, particularly for vulnerable populations who commute long distances due to imbalances between job locations and housing affordability. Using data from the 2010–2012 California Household Travel Survey, this study develops quantile regression models to examine the nonlinear effects of the built environment on daily personal-level VMT across different levels of automobile travel. Three key findings emerge. First, the effects of built environment characteristics vary across the VMT distribution rather than operating uniformly across travelers. Second, population density shows heterogeneous impacts: a one-unit increase (equivalent to 1000 persons per m2 in 20-minute driving accessibility) is associated with a 10–12.5% reduction in total VMT at quantiles above 0.60, about four times larger than the 2.5% reduction observed at the 0.20 quantile. Third, built environment characteristics also exhibit heterogeneous effects across different forms of automobile travel. For VMT from driving someone else, a one-unit increase in population density is associated with up to an 18% reduction at the 0.80 quantile, while for VMT as passengers the reduction reaches up to 12.5% at the 0.85 quantile.
This study analyzes how the willingness to pay (WTP) for a stated reduction in the risk of traffic accidents depends on the type of measure that delivers the reduction and on whether it is framed as a public or a private good. Building on previous studies, we designed and conducted a contingent valuation survey targeting a representative sample of the Swedish adult population. Our results suggest that WTP for risk reduction varies across measures, even when they are all of private good or all of a public good nature. Furthermore, for conventional safety measures, WTP for a stated risk reduction is higher in private-good settings. Still, for a measure based on a mobile app, the result is the opposite (in the full sample). These findings caution against uncritical use of a uniform unit value of risk reduction and suggest that some public hesitancy towards the use of digital instead of conventional safety-enhancing technologies remains.
Public procurement is a key lever for advancing low-carbon transport; however, evidence on its enablers and constraints remains fragmented. This systematic literature review of 35 empirical studies applies thematic analysis grounded in transaction cost economics and institutional theory to address that gap. The findings show that procurement decisions are shaped by the interaction between economic and institutional factors. Policy and regulatory pressures and environmental benefits are the most widely cited enablers, while high upfront costs, infrastructure limitations, and information gaps are the dominant constraints. These factors do not operate independently; institutional pressures shape how risks are perceived, while transaction costs determine whether policy signals translate into adoption. Based on these findings, this study proposes a conceptual framework explaining procurement through three pathways: financial, infrastructure, and information. The relative importance of coercive, normative, and mimetic pressures shifts as procurement experience accumulates. Notably, the information pathway becomes self-reinforcing, as each successful procurement reduces uncertainty and transaction costs for subsequent adopters through knowledge dissemination. The findings suggest that policy instruments should be sequenced according to the stage of adoption. Coercive mandates and financial support are most effective during early adoption, while information infrastructure and normative mechanisms become increasingly important as operational evidence accumulates.
Against the backdrop of shipping decarbonization, traditional freight-rate-centered risk connectedness has exhibited new characteristics. Using weekly data from July 23, 2010, to November 28, 2025, this study employs a quantile time-frequency spillover framework to examine risk transmission among carbon, shipping, and energy-related commodity markets. The results show that: (1) overall connectedness is substantially higher under extreme market conditions than under median conditions, and short-term transmission consistently exceeds long-term transmission. (2) Market connectedness exhibits pronounced quantile and frequency heterogeneity; methanol acts as a stronger net spillover transmitter in the overall and short-term bands, while the EU carbon market is more important at the lower quantile and the newbuilding market at the median-to-upper quantiles. Auxiliary newbuilding contract data provide supplementary evidence for changes in the risk role of the newbuilding market. (3) After the implementation of Phase IV of the EU ETS and the inclusion of shipping, cross-market spillovers show an upward trend. (4) Green shipping attention is conditionally associated with the outward spillover intensity of key markets, especially the newbuilding market. Overall, this study provides new evidence for understanding risk connectedness among carbon, shipping, and energy-related markets during the green transition.
This study benchmarks the economic, operational and environmental performance of 70 European airlines during the 2022–2025 post-pandemic adjustment period. Using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), a non-radial Slack-Based Inefficiency (SBI) model under variable returns to scale evaluates how labour and fleet resources generate operating revenue, flights and passengers while accounting for CO2 emissions as an undesirable output. The framework combines annual SBI scores, Super-SBI rankings, variable-specific slacks and an intertemporal indicator of changes in relative inefficiency.Efficient airlines increased from 20 in 2022 to 28 in 2024 and stood at 27 in 2025, with 17 remaining efficient throughout. Mean SBI declined from 0.3107 to 0.1835. Frontier-relative CO2 emissions gaps were concentrated among a subset of inefficient airlines, whereas others mainly displayed operational or economic shortfalls. Between 2022 and 2025, 50 airlines reduced their relative inefficiency, 18 recorded no net change and two deteriorated. Improvement did not necessarily imply frontier attainment, as some carriers moved closer while remaining inefficient. Robustness tests showed high numerical stability, although sensitivity varied across excluded variables. The findings demonstrate that annual frontier position and intertemporal change capture distinct, model-conditional dimensions of airline performance and support integrated benchmarking of resource use, economic outcomes, transport activity and environmental burden.
Identifying travel needs and preferences of different market segments is important in planning public transport systems. Preference-based market segmentation has been researched globally but rarely in the Sub-Saharan African context. This paper seeks to investigate variations in mode preference behaviour amongst public transport users in Soweto, Johannesburg. Revealed and stated preference surveys were conducted to capture travel choices in hypothetical scenarios involving bus rapid transit (BRT), bus, minibus taxis, Gautrain, car, and walk modes. The survey data was used to determine if preference heterogeneity exists amongst the respondents through a priori segmentation based on income and estimating multinomial and nested logit models, and by applying a latent class model. The latent class model identified two segments, labelled as, a “transfer sensitive” group and a “walk sensitive” group. The transfer sensitive group does not like using an access mode, transferring, and waiting, while the walk sensitive group tolerates access trips, transferring and waiting but does not like walking. The paper discusses the implications for public transport design. These include strategies that minimize transfers and reduce stop distances to attract both potential user groups as the network connectivity and access characteristics of a mode determine its attractiveness to different user groups.
Under the global carbon cap-and-trade mechanism, the timing of government subsidies in aviation decarbonization remains insufficiently examined within a unified framework. This paper develops a sequential game-theoretic model of a vertical aviation market comprising a government, a monopolistic airport, and an airline. We compare equilibrium outcomes across non-abatement, abatement, ex-ante subsidy, and ex-post subsidy scenarios. Airline emission abatement generates simultaneous increases in ticket prices and sales volume through cost-push and demand-pull effects. Airlines benefit only when fixed costs fall below a threshold determined by market size, consumer low-carbon preference intensity, and carbon trading price. Airports capture unconditional gains from traffic growth without bearing abatement costs, which reflects upstream rent extraction. Under an identical government budget, ex-ante subsidies induce strictly greater emission reductions than ex-post subsidies through a multiplier effect on marginal abatement costs. However, higher abatement does not necessarily imply higher social welfare. The welfare-optimal subsidy mechanism depends on the social value of unit emission abatement. We identify a unique externality-value threshold, denoted by γ*(G), that partitions the policy space under a given budget: ex-post subsidies dominate when the social value of abatement is below this threshold, whereas ex-ante subsidies dominate when it is above the threshold. These findings reveal a fundamental trade-off between environmental effectiveness and economic efficiency and provide theoretical guidance for subsidy timing design under heterogeneous environmental valuations.
Economic activity and its structure (i.e. tertiary, secondary and primary sectors) are strongly linked to the transport of goods and people. Transport is a central driver of energy consumption and generates negative externalities. The decoupling of transport demand from energy use and environmental pressure constitutes a challenge for sustainable development.This study proposes a mathematical identity for understanding the transport sector based on the application of the LMDI methodology. Firstly, based on this identity, the study examines the transport of goods, passengers, and the total transport volume. Secondly, it analyzes changes in economic activity and structure, and thirdly, changes in transport intensity, to determine which sectors drive or constrain transport activity.The results reveal that primary economic activity is the main driver of transport in Mexico, while in the USA, tertiary economic activity predominates. Specifically, the mining industry drives the transport of goods, and professional and technical services play a key role in passenger transport in both countries. However, transport intensity contributes to reducing the overall transport volume. The study concludes that the increase in transport volume at all levels will be driven by economic activity and supported by economic structure, significantly offsetting the reduction attributed to transport intensity.
In cost-benefit analysis of transport projects and policies, the measurement of users’ benefits is a key component of the net value. The Rule-of-a-Half (RoH) provides a simplified method for such measurement which, since its introduction in the Sixties, has been widely used in applied practice. The paper contributes to fill the theoretical gaps of the existing literature. A fully fledged foundation of the RoH according to microeconomics is provided. In a setting of divisible goods with deterministic utility, the RoH approximates the value of the Marshallian surplus line integral of the representative consumer for both quasi-linear and homothetic preferences. Dependence of demand on the generalized cost of travel is introduced in the model. In a setting of discrete choice with random utility, the RoH approximates the value of the expectation of the random Hicksian compensating variation and equivalent variation for a model with additive random terms and income independent choices. In the conclusions, usefulness and extension to the case of a new travel alternative are discussed.
Urban rail investments reshape land markets, yet rigorous evidence from the Global South, particularly regarding new projects in already consolidated cities, remains scarce. Bogotá, Colombia, provides a unique test case. In 2019, the city approved a 23.96 km elevated first metro line (L1) with 16 stations and simultaneously announced plans for a second, fully underground line (L2), now in procurement. This study offers a preliminary assessment of the debate over elevated versus underground alignments and their impact on land values. Using detailed cadastral data, we implement a two-step identification strategy. First, Coarsened Exact Matching (CEM) is used to create balanced samples: treatment blocks within 800 m of future stations and statistically comparable control blocks outside the metro corridors. Second, weighted log-linear regressions estimate price premiums while controlling for location, land-use characteristics, housing typology, and block-level attributes. The results reveal a robust premium effect from the mere announcement of the project. In 2019, residential land near L1 appreciated on average by 11.7% relative to matched controls, and the premium remained sizable, 8.8%, after 20% of construction was completed in 2023. Applying a similar model to the planned underground L2 yields an estimated 11.8% uplift. Infrastructure form also interacts with the existing built environment: blocks averaging fewer than four stories capture significantly smaller gains than taller blocks. By integrating CEM, this study provides the first estimate of anticipation-driven land-value change for a metro corridor in a consolidated city and quantifies how vertical morphology conditions those gains. The findings inform value-capture financing, identify where land development is most warranted, and contribute new evidence to the international debate on elevated versus underground urban rail design in rapidly growing cities.
Platform work regulation is often framed as a stark choice between preserving flexibility or providing protection, but little is known about how workers themselves weigh these trade-offs. We investigate ride-hailing drivers' policy preferences through a discrete choice experiment with 623 drivers across major Chinese cities, focusing on five regulatory dimensions: social insurance, working-hour limits, collective bargaining rights, vehicle licensing, and safety training. Drivers strongly support comprehensive social insurance and collective bargaining rights, while rejecting working-hour restrictions and mandatory safety training. They are willing to sacrifice 4.7 h of daily working time for comprehensive insurance but require 8.2 h of compensation for training mandates. Workers therefore evaluate regulation strategically, supporting measures that strengthen economic security and market position while resisting constraints that impose costs without benefits. The findings challenge binary flexibility-protection frameworks and provide evidence-based guidance for designing ride-hailing regulation that balances worker welfare, labour supply, and market sustainability.
