Abstract
This paper presents the Gompertz function of per capita GDP and vehicle stock to forecast the vehicle ownership of China through to 2050 against a background of increasing energy use and CO2 emissions associated with the potential demands of on-road vehicles. We forecast the level of vehicle stock in China based on the extant patterns of vehicle development in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, Europe, the United States and Japan. The results show that the OECD pattern and European pattern are more suitable for describing China’s vehicle stock growth when compared with Japanese and U.S. patterns. The study finds that China’s vehicle stock has developed as an S-shaped curve. During the forecast period, the inflection point of the increasing curve appears around the year 2030, with the annual growth of vehicle ownership increasing from 6.13% to 9.50% in the prior period prior and subsequently dropping to 0.45% in 2050. Based on the sensitivity analysis and robustness check, the impact of different Gompertz curve parameters and GDP growth rates on vehicle stock projection are analyzed.
Highlights
In recent years, the Chinese vehicle fleet has experienced rapid growth (Figure 1)
For parameters α and β derived from the Gompertz curve, we run regressions based on the OECD
We use the Hausman specification test to establish whether the Fixed Effects (FE) or the Random Effects (RE) model is the best tool to be used in the Gompertz function
Summary
The Chinese vehicle fleet has experienced rapid growth (Figure 1). Data from the. Huo and Wang [3] focus on the country level and estimate Chinese vehicle stocks by the Gompertz, Logistic and Richards functions. They assume two scenarios for the growth of private car ownership in China―a low-growth scenario and a high-growth scenario―where the saturation level of private car ownership per 1000 people is 400 and 500, respectively. They project that China will have nearly 20 times as many vehicles in 2030 as it had in 2002 This expansion is associated with both China’s rapid income growth and its per capita income during this period being related with vehicle ownership growing at over twice the rate of income.
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