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An Appraisal of Trade and Transportation Trends in Asia-Europe-Africa

Ghadiri Faraz, Bahador | 2011

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  1. Type of Document: M.Sc. Thesis
  2. Language: Farsi
  3. Document No: 41909 (09)
  4. University: Sharif University of Technology
  5. Department: Civil Engineering
  6. Advisor(s): Vaziri, Manouchehr
  7. Abstract:
  8. In this research, trade and transportation trends of Asia-Europe-Africa, in the both intercontinental and intracontinental levels have been analyzed. With analyses which are done in this research, determinant factors for modeling and investigating international bilateral trade in these three continents have been recognized. The relevant time-series data were extracted from centralized and international databases. The examined database consists of 11 variables grouped in four categories: bilateral trade data, transportation, geographical and socio-economic characteristics. Transportation data is based on three different networks. The first network consisted of highway, rail and marine modes with distance characteristic. The second network consisted of highway, rail, sea and air modes with cost characteristic. These two multimodal networks are newly developed in this research. The last network is the traditional air distance network. After collecting the pertinent data and creating the database for the study time span, with respect to aggregative demand for goods, export and import, gravity and linear programming models were developed. The distributions models facilitated identifying possible relations between trade and transportation during four decades covering 1965-2005 in Asia-Europe-Africa. Preliminary statistical analyses and cross-sectional analyses for the gravity model, introduced GDP and transportation variables as the most determinants of trade. The coefficients of gravity models reflected the elasticity's of dependent trade variables with respect to descriptive variables. The linear regression models of these trades elasticity’s through time showed an increasing time trends. Our results offer no evidence of the “death of distance”. The comparisons between optimal trade distributions in Asia-Europe-Africa, based on developed linear programming models, and their observed distributions showed differences in the most cases. During prospected time period in the intercontinental level and Asia, the observed trade distributions often did not follow their distributions based on the optimal linear programming solutions in contrast with Africa and Europe. Comparison results for multimodal networks revealed that the percentage of improvement has greater value with respect to the distance parameter than the cost parameter over time. Considering trends of the percentage of improvement, our results showed how the cost parameter will be more reasonable and more comprehensive impedance factor than the distance parameter for analyzing and assessing international trade flows
  9. Keywords:
  10. Multimodal Transportation ; Gravity Model ; Modeling ; Linear Programming ; Freight International Transportation ; Trade Transportation Elasticity

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