Research Issues in Transport Economics: Dynamics, Integration, and Indirect Effects

Abstract

Transport policy assessment is usually based on a comparative static Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) using a transport network model. However, transport policies exert impacts also outside the transport system. These impacts exhibit different dynamic characteristics and affect other systems than the transport system itself like the economic system or vehicle purchase decisions. Hence to improve transport policy assessment it would be required to integrate those systems into the analysis and to model the dynamic interactions between them. Following these suggestions transport policy assessment could be based on or accompanied by measuring indirect effects (e.g. change of GDP or employment). The paper describes a dynamic integrated system model to measure indirect effects of transport policies.