Abstract
The relationship between transportation and communications has been discussed throughout the past decades. This study also investigates that relationship to determine whether they are complementary or substitutive in terms of the industrial perspective, focusing mainly on six Asian countries (China, Japan, India, Korea, Indonesia, and Taiwan). National input-output (I-O) tables from the World Input-Output Database (WIOD) were used to construct research dataset. Each activity in the table was examined and fell into either transportation or communications category when they are related to those categories, thereby establishing six categories: Transportation manufacturing (TM), transportation utilities (TU), communications manufacturing (CM), communications utilities (CU), all transportation (AT), and all communications (AC). To examine the interrelationship between two sectors, direct and total coefficients were calculated for four benchmark years (2000, 2005, 2010, and 2014), then Spearman correlation analysis was conducted using those two coefficient matrices after weighting each coefficient using the economic contribution-based weight (ECBW). As a result, we confirm the predominant complementary relationship between two industries. Most Asian countries present consistent, dominant complementarity in both direct and total analysis. Although there are mixed total effects in Japan and Taiwan, the overall pattern demonstrates remarkable positive relationships. In analyzing the same effects in western countries, we also find the same straightforward positive association between two sectors, mostly in France, the US, and the UK. We believe that our findings can contribute to the literature by providing compelling evidence of the overall trend of a complementary relationship between two industries.
Highlights
As information and communication technology (ICT) including the technologies, products, and applications that facilitate mobile internet access [1] has rapidly developed, the relationship between transportation and communications has been extensively discussed in the transportation area e.g., [1,2,3]
With respect to that relationship in Taiwan, it is found that the overall trend of correlations is considerably similar to that in China: (1) There is a consistent, complementary association between the two sectors, and it outstands in transportation utilities (TU)-related pairs, and (2) the transportation manufacturing pairs do not have a significant relationship with the communications industry across four benchmark years
This might be because the prior one (1) was conducted using I-O tables with Industrial Classification of All Economic Activities (ISIC) ver. 3 (United Nations, New York, NY, USA, 2002), whereas our dataset follows a recent classification of ISIC ver. 4, or (2) did not consider how much each industry contributes to the entire economy, namely, all coefficients were not weighted properly, which potentially includes many cases having negative relationships between transportation and communications in the total analysis even though those two sectors were positively correlated in the direct analysis
Summary
As information and communication technology (ICT) including the technologies, products, and applications that facilitate mobile internet access [1] has rapidly developed, the relationship between transportation and communications has been extensively discussed in the transportation area e.g., [1,2,3]. Lee and Mokhtarian [17] used aggregate consumer expenditure data from the US (1984–2002) to analyze the relationship between two industries The authors observed both complementarity and substitution between the two by estimating consumer demand functions, where implying the relationship is complicated, and there might not be a clear single effect. Given that the majority of aggregate-based studies have looked into consumer demand for transportation and communications, even though considerable expenditures on transportation and communications have been made by industry areas [18], some researchers analyzed the association using input-output (I-O) analysis of industrial uses. Chang, Mokhtarian and Hwang [18] applied the same methodology to determine the relationship focusing on six major Asian countries and compared results with developed counties in Sustainability 2020, 12, 3085 the West (to the best of our knowledge, this is the latest research using I-O analysis to investigate the relationship between the two).
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