Mirroring the railroad industry of the 1940's and 1950's, the trucking industry today appears to be achieving impressive productivity gains. But it is easy to confuse true productivity advances in transportation industries with changes in ton-miles per unit of input that are due simply to...

This Working Paper analyses the economic importance of the Belgian ports largely based on annual accounts data for the year 2017. As the years prior to 2017 have been described in earlier papers in the same series, the emphasis lies on the figures for 2017 and the developments between 2016 and...

This Working Paper provides an extensive overview of the economic importance and development of the Flemish maritime ports, the Liège port complex and the port of Brussels for the period 2013 - 2018 in terms of value added, employment and investment. Each of these ports play a major role in...

In 2020, Belgian ports generated € 31.8 billion in direct and indirect value added (7% of Belgian GDP) and employed 254 611 full-time equivalents (FTEs) either directly or indirectly (5.9% of Belgian domestic employment including the self-employed). Despite the COVID-19 outbreak, direct...

The main purpose of this Working Paper is providing an overview of the economic importance of the Flemish maritime ports, the Liège port complex and the port of Brussels over the period 2014-2019 in terms of value added, employment and investment based on annual account figures. In 2019,...

This paper investigates the factors that influence the change in passenger ski-lift transports between a normal winter and an anomalously mild winter based on individual lift and aggregate ski-area data. Special focus is placed on the return on investments in new ski lifts. Using endogenous...

Subsidies are considered important means to facilitate the provision of public transit, yet the empirical evidence implies that they can have harming effects on costs and possibly also on operators' performance. This paper examines the impacts of deficit-balancing subsidies on the cost...

The Australian Railways Business and Economics Conference was held in Perth, Australia, on July 20th 2009, bringing together 30 participants from industry, government and academia. The conference heard from six presenters: Paul Larsen – General Manager, Westnet Rail; Professor Tim Brennan –...

The focus of this study is to assess the causal impact of the connection of a local area to a high-speed rail network (HSR) on firms' total factor productivity (TFP). The quasi-random location of the HSR station in the Italian city of Reggio Emilia is exploited in a Difference-in Differences...