Logistics and land use planning: An application of the ACIT indicator in European port regions

Abstract

Logistics infrastructures play an important role in many fields of economic activity, substantially influencing land use planning. Despite this, scholars and practitioners have dedicated little attention to setting up efficient indicators able to define the effect that infrastructure investments have on industrial activities. Many theoretical and empirical studies have been dedicated to calculating the exact numerical effect of infrastructure investment on social wellbeing, but their explicative capacity has always proved to be scarce since it is difficult work and with high levels of arbitrariness. This work becomes much more difficult when it aims to determine the effects on industrial efficiency. In this paper, we will use an indicator to overcome the problems related to determination of the exact economic impact of infrastructure investment on an economic region or local territory and suggest land use policy models to analyse infrastructure economic impacts. More specifically, we will focus our attention on the factors affecting logistics and economic performance within the economic regions around twenty major European ports. By using the new ACIT (Autoregulation, Compensation, Invariance and Transversality) indicator, we show that positive effects, deriving from port logistics interventions, can occur in those regions that have an ACIT indicator positively associated with other variables, such as propensity to innovation and level of education. This indicator represents a starting point to study how, in the better performing regions, it could be possible to develop logistics services able to stimulate a higher level of transport demand and, at the same time, respect high standards in environmental quality. Finally, we explain how an improvement in logistics performances of a port region may determine an improvement in its socioeconomic and environmental conditions.