THE IMPACT OF ECONOMIC GROWTH ON ROAD TRANSPORTS IN ROMANIA. AN ECONOMETRIC ANALYSIS

Abstract

Transport is considered a priority field in any development context, especially if we take into consideration its interdependence with all other branches of national economy. Development of transports includes improving the road, railroad, river, sea and air services. Once the constant target for each country is reached – meaning the economic increase – we expect the problem of protecting the environment to gather more and more interest, and, of course, the results should be good. But the available statistical data shows that, especially in urban areas, atmospheric pollution represents a problem which has newer and newer dimensions, increasing in size, being a consequence of the urbanisation phenomena. We focused our attention on the main factors responsible for this pollution and we observed that producing energy and transport are its the main sources. We have chosen to concentrate our attention in this paper on the problem of transport, to analyse the link between economic indicators and those related to the evolution of the number of passengers that use public transportation and the number of registered passenger cars, underlining the need to come up with a sustainable transport. To test the relationship between these variables, we use a simple regression model, to show how the GDP influences the two variables, the number of passenger that traveled using mass transit means and the number of registered road vehicles in circulation at the end of the year.

Keywords

• sustainable transport
• pollution
• GDP
• passengers
• cars.