A new dataset of distance and time related transport costs for EU regions

• Transport costs data are a key input for trade analysis and for industry-level studies focusing on spatial distribution and logistics. Surprisingly, good transport estimates at a detailed spatial level for the EU are not readily available.
• This Policy Insight presents a new freely available dataset containing estimates of distance and time related transport costs between all NUTS-2 EU regions.
• This Insight briefly illustrates both the main assumptions behind the construction of the dataset and its core characteristics.
• The estimates take into account both the time needed and the distance covered by a representative truck travelling along optimal routes between samples of points within the EU regions.
• The resulting dataset contains an origin-destination cost matrix in euros at the region pair level. Moreover, the sampling approach allows calculating average transport costs within each region.
• Both arithmetic and harmonic averages are considered - the latter may be more relevant for interaction modelling such as the estimation of trade gravity equations.

Authors:

PERSYN Damiaan, DIAZ LANCHAS Jorge, BARBERO JIMENEZ Javier, CONTE Andrea, SALOTTI Simone