2.
General Trends Controlling Transport Growth and Demand Transport sustainability is controlled by socio-economic, demographic and environmental megatrends, i.e. major shifts in economic, social and environmental conditions that can impact people at all levels and transform societies. In recent decades, large sections of the global society have benefited from market access and the dissemination of knowledge and technology, but others remain marginalized. Stronger trade and investment links have augmented global interdependence, but also increased the contagion risks from a financial crisis. Disparate population and economic growth dynamics have resulted in greater income inequalities, whereas environmental degradation has worsened due to non-sustainable production and consumption patterns. At the same time, long term climatic changes and extreme weather events (SREX, 2012; IPCC, 2013) can result in large transport infrastructure damages and costs (UNECE, 2013), and undermine efforts to achieve sustainable development. This chapter will provide an overview of global and regional economic development, as well as social, demographic and environmental trends, and describe their implications for the future development of the inland transport sector in accordance with the principles and requirements for achieving sustainable development of society.
2.1
Economic Development
2.1.1
Global Trends
Globalization was accelerated in the nineteenth century, when technological progress in the transportation sector cut the cost of transportation and drove a sustained trade expansion of about 4 per cent annually throughout the century (DESA, 2013). The latest globalization boom has been, however, qualitatively different, as underlying global production patterns have fundamentally changed through the rise of transnational corporations and globalized transport chains. Assembly-oriented export production, mostly concentrated in the industrialising East Asian economies, has introduced a ‘reversed’ geographical fragmentation of production, creating at the same time further requirements for efficient global transport networks. It is interesting to note that, in the past decades, trade has grown at much faster rates than those of the World GDP (United Nations, 2010). There is, however, a structural regional diversity in trade growth. Growth in production of manufactured goods has been mostly limited to Asia, whereas in Africa and, to a lesser extent, in Latin America trade growth has been dominated by increases in commodity exports and/or imports of manufactured and capital goods (Erten and Ocampo, 2012). At the same time, foreign direct investment has been growing faster than world trade, reaching 1.5 trillion United States dollars in 2011 (UNCTAD, 2012). Trade flows have recovered from their 2008–2009 collapse (Figure 2.1), but growth is projected to remain slower than that prevailing before the 2008–2009 crisis, at least for some years (United Nations, 2013).
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