Changes in undesirable impacts on sustainable road transport: A DEA-based malmquist productivity index approach

Abstract

Road transport is vital to the economic development, trade and social integration. However, it is also responsible for the majority of negative impacts on environment and society. To achieve sustainable development, there is a growing need for a country to assess its undesirable costs so as to determine its road transport policy. In this study, total energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, as well as the number of fatalities in the European road transport are selected representing the level of sustainable development in each member state of the European Union (EU). With data from the period of 1995-2007, the extent to which the 27 EU countries have improved their ‘productivity’ on sustainable road transport is evaluated based on data envelopment analysis (DEA) and Malmquist productivity index, which measures the productivity change over time, and can be further decomposed into two components: the change in efficiency and the technical change. The results show a considerable progress towards the sustainable road transport in Europe during this period. The decomposition into the two components further revealed that the bulk of the improvement was attained through the adoption of productivity-enhancing new technologies throughout the road transport sector, rather than through the relatively inefficient countries catching up with those efficient ones. In addition, the growth in both two aspects slowed down in 2007, which implies the momentum of further improvement is in danger of being lost so that new impetus is needed.