Three approaches to calculate economic impacts from pricing schemes on heavy vehicles

Abstract

Using pricing or fees can to a very large extent be compared to infrastructure investment because both change the costs of transport between two locations. These effects can be of considerable size and it is thus important to know what the effects are and where they occur. Most of the literature on HVF is concerned with the practical implementation of a HVF, the degree of optimal pricing of a proposed HVF and the traffic impacts. This is interesting because a vast amount of literature exists investigating the relationship between transport and land-use as well as the relationship between infrastructure investment and (regional) economic impacts. This paper aims at describing and comparing a number of studies of the relationship between heavy vehicle fees (HVF) and the economy.
Three different types of models used to assess economic impacts are described: system dynamic models (SDM), spatial general equilibrium models (SCGE) and input output models (I/O); also various combinations of these model types can be applied. The general description of these different models types is supplemented with three case studies using I/O and SCGE models on HVFs in Germany, Denmark and Norway. The results from these case studies show similarities in the types and size of the results. Especially the price effects and employment effects are similar in all case studies.