Economic and environmental aspects of inland transport in EU countries

Transport is one of the most essential sectors of the EU member state economies. Measurement of the efficiency of transport operations seems to be interesting from the perspective of both the economy as a whole and individual companies operating in the transport sector. The largest proportion of freight transport in the European Union is done by road. The purpose of this paper is to determine the efficiency of road and rail freight transport in old and new European Union countries based on the data envelopment analysis (DEA) method. To that end, the authors present a literature review reflecting the current state of research on the importance of transport and its development in relation to the economy and environmental problems. Additionally, the methods of data analysis and variables are described. The empirical part is divided into a presentation of DEA results and correlation between the transport efficiency, gross domestic product (GDP), and CO2 emissions results. Moreover, spatial analysis was used to characterize road and rail transport efficiency in EU member states. The last section gives a summary of the study, and the obtained results are compared with data from the literature review.