IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/udc/wpaper/wp261.html

Affordability of public transport: a methodological clarification

Author

Listed:
  • Andrés Gómez-Lobo Echeñique

Abstract

There has been a surge of interest recently on the relation between poverty and transport policies. When analyzing the relation between poverty and transport, often the “affordability” of public transport is estimated. In this paper we present two alternative definitions of affordability used in the transport literature and discuss their limitations. Any affordability measure covering only transport expenditure is bound to be a very partial view of household welfare. In addition, the required affordability benchmark to determine whether transport costs are high or not is arbitrary. Therefore, the approach that uses the absolute level of these affordability measures is meaningless. We also show in this paper that the change in the affordability measures, as opposed to its absolute level, can be given a more rigorous interpretation in terms of traditional welfare economics. In spite of this last result, we argue that to analyze whether transport subsidies are meeting their social or distributional objectives it is much more fruitful to use traditional income distributional tools such as the relative benefit curve and its associated Gini coefficient.

Suggested Citation

  • Andrés Gómez-Lobo Echeñique, 2007. "Affordability of public transport: a methodological clarification," Working Papers wp261, University of Chile, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:udc:wpaper:wp261
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.econ.uchile.cl/uploads/publicacion/db395ea5-f323-448c-b00a-935049986dcb.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Banks, James & Blundell, Richard & Lewbel, Arthur, 1996. "Tax Reform and Welfare Measurement: Do We Need Demand System Estimation?," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 106(438), pages 1227-1241, September.
    2. Cropper, Maureen & Bhattacharya, Soma, 2007. "Public transport subsidies and affordability in Mumbai, India," Policy Research Working Paper Series 4395, The World Bank.
    3. James Banks & Richard Blundell & Arthur Lewbel, 1997. "Quadratic Engel Curves And Consumer Demand," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 79(4), pages 527-539, November.
    4. Lewbel, Arthur, 1989. "Household equivalence scales and welfare comparisons," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 39(3), pages 377-391, August.
    5. World Bank, 2002. "Cities on the Move : A World Bank Urban Transport Strategy Review," World Bank Publications - Books, The World Bank Group, number 15232, April.
    6. John Muellbauer, 1975. "Aggregation, Income Distribution and Consumer Demand," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 42(4), pages 525-543.
    7. Deaton, Angus S & Muellbauer, John, 1980. "An Almost Ideal Demand System," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 70(3), pages 312-326, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. is not listed on IDEAS
    2. Gandelman, Néstor & Serebrisky, Tomás & Suárez-Alemán, Ancor, 2019. "Household spending on transport in Latin America and the Caribbean: A dimension of transport affordability in the region," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 79(C), pages 1-1.
    3. Zhao, Pengjun & Zhang, Yixue, 2019. "The effects of metro fare increase on transport equity: New evidence from Beijing," Transport Policy, Elsevier, vol. 74(C), pages 73-83.
    4. Dewita, Yulia & Yen, Barbara T.H. & Burke, Matthew, 2018. "The effect of transport cost on housing affordability: Experiences from the Bandung Metropolitan Area, Indonesia," Land Use Policy, Elsevier, vol. 79(C), pages 507-519.
    5. Murad Mohammed & Sanjaya Senadheera, 2022. "Public Transport Affordability Evaluation for Addis Ababa City," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 14(11), pages 1-18, June.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Toshinobu Matsuda, 2006. "A trigonometric flexible consumer demand system," Canadian Journal of Economics, Canadian Economics Association, vol. 39(1), pages 145-162, February.
    2. Gahvari Firouz & Taheripour Farzad, 2011. "Fiscal Reforms in General Equilibrium: Theory and an Application to the Subsidy Debate in Iran," The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, De Gruyter, vol. 11(1), pages 1-54, June.
    3. Barnett, William A. & Serletis, Apostolos, 2008. "Consumer preferences and demand systems," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 147(2), pages 210-224, December.
    4. Kira Lancker & Julia Bronnmann, 2022. "Substitution Preferences for Fish in Senegal," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 82(4), pages 1015-1045, August.
    5. Rishab Guha & Serena Ng, 2019. "A Machine Learning Analysis of Seasonal and Cyclical Sales in Weekly Scanner Data," NBER Chapters, in: Big Data for Twenty-First-Century Economic Statistics, pages 403-436, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    6. Denni Tommasi, 2016. "Household Responses to cash Transfers," Working Papers ECARES ECARES 2016-20, ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles.
    7. Urzúa, Carlos M., 2004. "The Ahmad-Stern approach revisited: Variants and an application to Mexico," EGAP Working Papers 2004-05, Tecnológico de Monterrey, Campus Ciudad de México.
    8. Laura Blow, 2003. "Demographics in demand systems," IFS Working Papers W03/18, Institute for Fiscal Studies.
    9. Andrej Cupák & Peter Tóth, 2017. "Measuring the Efficiency of VAT reforms: Evidence from Slovakia," Working and Discussion Papers WP 6/2017, Research Department, National Bank of Slovakia.
    10. Jan Marvin Garbuszus & Notburga Ott & Sebastian Pehle & Martin Werding, 2021. "Income-dependent equivalence scales: A fresh look at German micro-data," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 19(4), pages 855-873, December.
    11. Peter Tóth & Andrej Cupák & Marian Rizov, 2021. "Measuring the efficiency of VAT reforms: a demand system simulation approach," Oxford Economic Papers, Oxford University Press, vol. 73(3), pages 1218-1243.
    12. Chavas, Jean-Paul & Menon, Martina & Pagani, Elisa & Perali, Federico, 2018. "Collective household welfare and intra-household inequality," Theoretical Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 13(2), May.
    13. Arabatzis, Garyfallos & Klonaris, Stathis, 2009. "An analysis of Greek wood and wood product imports: Evidence from the linear quadratic aids," Forest Policy and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 11(4), pages 266-270, July.
    14. LaFrance, Jeffrey T., 2008. "The structure of US food demand," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 147(2), pages 336-349, December.
    15. Simona Bigerna & Carlo Andrea Bollino & Maria Chiara D’Errico, 2020. "A general expenditure system for estimation of consumer demand functions," Economia Politica: Journal of Analytical and Institutional Economics, Springer;Fondazione Edison, vol. 37(3), pages 1071-1088, October.
    16. Veeramani, Venkat N. & Maynard, Leigh J., 2004. "Testing For The Existence Of Price Points In Retail Milk Scanner Data Using Microeconomic Theory," 2004 Annual meeting, August 1-4, Denver, CO 20378, American Agricultural Economics Association (New Name 2008: Agricultural and Applied Economics Association).
    17. Maganga, Assa Mulagha & Phiri, M. Alexander R. & Mapemba, Lawrence D. & Gebremariam, Gebrelibanos G. & Dzanja, Josephy K., 2014. "A Food Demand System Estimation for Rural Malawi: Estimates Using Third Integrated Household Survey Data," 2014 Annual Meeting, July 27-29, 2014, Minneapolis, Minnesota 174853, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.
    18. Renner, Sebastian & Lay, Jann & Schleicher, Michael, 2017. "The Effects of Energy Price Changes: Heterogeneous Welfare Impacts, Energy Poverty, and CO₂ Emissions in Indonesia," GIGA Working Papers 302, GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies.
    19. Claudio Michelini, 1999. "Equivalence scales and consumption inequality: a study of household consumption patterns in italy," Departmental Working Papers 1999-02, Department of Economics, Management and Quantitative Methods at Università degli Studi di Milano.
    20. Awudu Abdulai, 2002. "Household Demand for Food in Switzerland. A Quadratic Almost Ideal Demand System," Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics (SJES), Swiss Society of Economics and Statistics (SSES), vol. 138(I), pages 1-18, March.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    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:udc:wpaper:wp261. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: Mohit Karnani (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/deuclcl.html .

    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.