IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/pseptp/hal-04246926.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Transport costs: measures, determinants, and regional policy implications for France

Author

Listed:
  • Pierre-Philippe Combes
  • Miren Lafourcade

    (RITM - Réseaux Innovation Territoires et Mondialisation - Université Paris-Saclay, PSE - Paris School of Economics - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - ENPC - École des Ponts ParisTech - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement)

Abstract

We develop a methodology to accurately compute transport costs. Based on the real transport network, our measure encompasses the characteristics of infrastructure, vehicle and energy used, as well as labor, insurance, tax and general charges borne by transport carriers. Computed for the 341 French employment areas, road transport shipments and the period 1978--1998, this new measure is compared to alternative ones such as great circle distance, real distance, or real time. We conclude that these proxies do a very good job in capturing transport costs in cross-section analysis. However, important discrepancies limit the possibility of using them in time series analysis. Moreover, our measure allows us to identify the policies that most impact transport costs. We show that transport technology and market structure are responsible for most of the transport cost decrease. Infrastructure improvements only condition the spatial distribution of the gains. Finally, some implications for researchers and regional policy makers are derived. Copyright 2005, Oxford University Press.
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • Pierre-Philippe Combes & Miren Lafourcade, 2005. "Transport costs: measures, determinants, and regional policy implications for France," PSE-Ecole d'économie de Paris (Postprint) hal-04246926, HAL.
  • Handle: RePEc:hal:pseptp:hal-04246926
    DOI: 10.1093/jnlecg/lbh062
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:pseptp:hal-04246926. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Caroline Bauer (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.