Sustainable urban transport strategies and job creation

This work is based on 2 working papers, produced within the NEUJOBS project (www.neujobs.eu). We studied the impact of a number of transport policies in the EU, focussing on the interaction of transport with the labour market. The objective was to determine: - if policies towards promoting sustainable transport have a positive impact on net job creation. - if so, which policies or combination of policies are the most effective in stimulating the labour market and for what reasons - in which EU countries the impacts were the largest - the impact of demographic changes and resource scarcity on the sustainability of transport. In the project this is called: 'a socio-ecological transition'. - the contribution of each policy to reducing the social and environmental externality of transport The results we present are based on a set of model runs with the EDIP model (Ivanova O., Heyndrickx C et al, 2007) which was developed in the REFIT project (part of the EU FP6 framework program). The EDIP model is a Computable General Equilibrium model for Europe, covering each country of the EU 28 and Switzerland, Norway and Turkey. We combine literature review on the marginal impact of transport policy on net job creation & growth in GDP, with model runs and scenario analysis. The reference year for the scenario analysis is 2030. The scenarios take into account a number of demographic changes, rise in the price of resources & fuels and technological change. We make a detailed analysis for 8 EU countries (AT, BE, DE, FI, ES, BG, PL, IT) and a more general analysis of the impact for the full EU.We find that 1) Policies aiming at improving the sustainability of transport can have a positive impact on employment, while reducing the external cost of transport. This is most clear with policies towards improving transport efficiency & internalization of external costs. 2) Fuel efficiency & especially the introduction of electric vehicles are not affecting the job market positively, as was claimed in other studies. 3) The relative impact of the proposed transport policies is about 3 times larger in the Eastern European countries, when measured in an FTE / million euro equivalent. 4) The impact of transit development on GDP is much lower that claimed in some VAR based studies