Untitled - Ministerstwo Rozwoju Regionalnego

of EU transport policy. But it has not been attained yet. The demand for transport
in the European Union has systematically been growing at the same rate as
the economy, or faster. The growth rate was almost 20% in the case of passenger
transport and ca 30% for cargo transport.
The demand for cargo transport has been growing considerably since 1992,
which results in greater environmental impact of transport. However, if we take
a closer look at the data concerning transport and GDP in individual EU member
states, it turns out that EU-15 indicated a much higher growth rate in terms
of demand for transport than 12 New Member States (NMS). The explanation of
such a situation is that in “the old” EU countries introduction of common market
caused certain changes in location and organization of production, which resulted
in growing demand for transport, the growth rate being bigger than that
of economic growth. And in the majority of “new” EU countries the processes
of economic restructuring and transformation, changes in structure of production
from heavy industry towards branches producing high value products resulted
in a situation in which the relations of growth rate in transport and that
of economic growth were not as strong as in EU-15. Unfortunately, economists
say that this is a temporary trend and that it is likely that the new member states
will in the future follow the “old” member states in this respect. Figure 56 presents
mutual relations between transport and the GDP in EU-25.
If we analyze the data presented in Fig. 57 we notice that the demand for
cargo transport exceeded economic growth in the last decade. It means that the
Index EU25 in 1995 = 100
120
115
110
105
100
95
Decoupling of demand for cargo transport vs. ) GNP (annual changes
GNP in 1995 prices
Cargo transport in tkm
1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003
Fig. 57. Comparison of growth rate of demand for transport and GDP in EU-25
Source: Transport and Environment: on the way to a new common transport policy. TERM 2006: Indicators tracking
transport and environment in the European Union. EEA, Copenhagen 2007.
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