How to Translate Economic Activity into Freight Transportation?

In this paper, the relationship between the amount of transported goods and economic activities by industries is investigated. Using historical EUROSTAT supply-use tables for Germany, we developed an economic indicator with which the interdependency between 59 industries (NACE classified) their 59 products (CPA classified) and the amount of 24 types of transported goods (NST/R classified) can be shown. In the results, we can observe a strong interdependency between the majority of the transported goods and the developed economic indicator. This enables us to explain statistically about 91% of the amount of the transported goods by economic activity in Germany. Therefore we can state that the developed indicator is suited to translate economic activity into freight transportation. On the one hand, the findings might contribute to the coupling/decoupling discussion. Using the developed indicator we see how coupled the transport volume to economic development really is. On the other hand, the outcome and the developed economic indicator are highly relevant for the freight modelling community because the proper translation of economic activity into freight transportation is still a challenge. Models without an explicit freight generation module can use the economic indicator to derive the transport demand from economic development. Models with an advanced freight generation approach such as SCGE or MRIO can use the method to obtain a control variable for their model outcomes.