Computable General Equilibrium Modeling for Transportation Economics
Summary
Computable general equilibrium (CGE) models provide a comprehensive framework for assessing the wide-ranging economic impacts of transport policies and infrastructure investments. By simulating interactions among households, firms, governments and markets, CGE models capture feedback effects between transport costs, production, consumption and welfare. In transportation economics, these models are increasingly linked with detailed network representations or traditional four-step frameworks to generate trip matrices, assign flows and feed updated travel costs back into the economy. Such integrated approaches allow analysts to evaluate the distributional consequences of tolls, infrastructure expansions, decarbonisation measures and land-use changes across regions and sectors. The global applicability of CGE modelling has proven valuable for comparing policy options, informing sustainable transport strategies and quantifying both short-term shocks and long-term structural shifts in mobility systems.
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Computable General Equilibrium Modeling for Transportation Economics publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in computable general equilibrium modeling for transportation economics across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Computable General Equilibrium model: a numerical simulation capturing interactions across all sectors, markets and agents in an economy under equilibrium constraints.
Four-step transport model: a sequential framework for forecasting travel demand and flows through trip generation, distribution, mode choice and assignment.
Derived demand: demand for transport services driven by underlying economic activities and consumption of goods and services.
User equilibrium: a network assignment principle where travellers choose routes to minimise individual travel costs, leading to equal costs across used routes.
Input–Output table: a matrix representing the flow of goods and services between sectors, forming the basis for economic impact analysis.
References
- Integrating a computable general equilibrium model with the four-step framework. Transportation (2022).
- Regional and environmental impacts of expanding the heavy duty vehicle charge to the secondary road network in Austria. Empirica (2012).
- Regional analysis of domestic integration in Egypt: an interregional CGE approach. Journal of Economic Structures (2016).
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