Impact of Changing Industrial Value Chains on Freight Transport Demand

Abstract

A massive change of the production system characterizes the economic development of the last decades inducing an increased transport demand because of the re-organization of value chains. While there is a consensus about the general relationship between the modification of the system and its impact on transport, it has not been clarified until now what this means on the level of the firm from both a quantitative and qualitative perspective. Which firms are particularly affected by these changes and what does this mean for their ‘new’ transport demand? Empirical knowledge about these particular effects on transport demand is quite modest. While a number of highly aggregated descriptive data about production and traffic are collected and registered, detailed information about effects on freight traffic is rare. On the basis of a representative standardized empirical survey among more than 900 manufacturing firms in Germany, the article investigates the impact of outsourcing and just-in-time delivery and production on the transport demand of the individual firm. It can be shown that the structural modifications of both sales and supply markets have multiple direct effects on transport demand and freight traffic, above all the increase in transport demand – however with considerable variations depending from firm size and branch.