Impact of Public Transportation on European Countries’ Development: a Spatial Perspective

Sustainability is a key topic nowadays, mostly because in the last decade the pollution levels have reached an all-time high. National governments are searching for sustainable and environmentally friendly solutions to decrease the amount of pollution. This study is a cross-sectional study on 27 European countries, using data gathered in 2020. This study's main goal is to show the environmental sustainability of public transportation and its impact on country development in Europe. The methodology used in this study will consist of spatial econometrics methods with visual maps and graphs to help with a better visual representation of the phenomena presented. The empirical evidence will be confirmed by the spatial regression's results. Because the spatial diagnostic tests revealed that the spatial processes are present in terms of both spatial lag and spatial errors, the model that was used was a Spatial Autoregressive Moving Average Model (SARMA). Moreover, the environmental sustainability of public transport is also a significant factor. The expected results from which this study began – specifically, that the spatiality has a significant impact in modelling the relationship between public transportation and economic development – were confirmed.