Vehicle Ownership and Income Growth, Worldwide: 1960-2030

By J. Dargay, D. Gately, Martin Sommer. 2007

820 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The speed of vehicle ownership expansion in emerging market and developing countries has important implications for transport and environmental policies, as well as the global oil market. The literature remains divided on the issue of whether the vehicle ownership rates will ever catch up to the levels common in the advanced economies. This paper contributes to the debate by building a model that explicitly models the vehicle saturation level as a function of observable country characteristics: urbanization and population density. Our model is estimated on the basis of pooled time-series (1960-2002) and crosssection data for 45 countries that include 75 percent of the world’s population. We project that the total vehicle stock will increase from about 800 million in 2002 to more than two billion units in 2030. By this time, 56% of the world’s vehicles will be owned by non-OECD countries, compared with 24% in 2002. In particular, China’s vehicle stock will increase nearly twenty-fold, to 390 million in 2030. This fast speed of vehicle ownership expansion implies rapid growth in oil demand.

Subfields: Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment, Transportation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fd7ca572699af73358e5241fc2c3b25590e01807

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Citations in the corpus

The Accelerating Biophysical Contradictions of Industrial Capitalist Agriculture (2010, background): “Dargay et al. (2007, 28) suggest ‘that the future strong growth in the vehicle stock in developing countries will lead to significant increases in oil demand from the transport sector’, led by countries such as China, India and Brazil, with China expected to be the world’s largest automotive market…”
Impact of the electricity mix and use profile in the life-cycle assessment of electric vehicles (2013, background): “With access to a more accessible mobility, the demand for new vehicles is rising rapidly and vehicle numbers are estimated to more than double before 2050, with highest growth rates in developing countries [2–4].”
Impacts of urbanization on national transport and road energy use : Evidence from low, middle and high income countries (2012, background): “While growth in vehicle ownership is mainly due to income growth (Chemin, 2009; Dargay et al., 2007), the growth rate of vehicle ownership varies across different stages of economic development.”
Cars on a diet : the material and energy impacts of passenger vehicle weight reduction in the U.S. (2010, background): “The modeled number of vehicles in use is also checked to not exceed the estimated vehicle ownership saturation level of 850 vehicles per 1,000 people, based on income and population density [73], which is calculated from the projected U.”
Analytical Solution to the Minimum Energy Consumption Based Velocity Profile Optimization Problem With Variable Road Grade (2014, background): “As Dargay et al. (2007) reports in more developed countries like USA and Germany the number of vehicles per 100 people is almost saturated and the increase in number of vehicles is proportional to increase in population, however, in the developing countries there is a great potential in increase in…”
Climate change accounting research: keeping it interesting and different (2011, background): “Dargay et al. (2007) and Dargay and Gately (1999) report much higher levels of ownership.”
Gasoline Demand with Heterogeneity in Household Responses (2010, background): “Demand satiation can also be explained by saturation of vehicle ownership levels, whereby increased income does not lead to increased vehicle ownership (Dargay et al., 2007).”
On the Causal Nexus of Road Transport CO2 Emissions and Macroeconomic Variables in Tunisia: Evidence from Combined Cointegration Tests (2015, methodology): “[8] found that the relationship between car ownership and per capita income has a general S-shaped.”