Energy Import Dependency, Tourism Demand and Innovation Capacity as Determinants of Collective Passenger Transport Performance: Heterogeneous Panel Evidence from the EU-27

The collective share of inland passenger transport has remained remarkably stagnant across the European Union over the past two decades, despite an expanding policy architecture aimed at accelerating modal shift. The objective of this study is to identify the macro-structural economic forces underlying this outcome and to assess whether their effects are consistent across EU member states. This approach seeks to explain the persistence of the aggregate modal share in economic terms rather than attributing it solely to insufficient policy ambition. The analysis therefore examines the long-run drivers of passenger transport service performance, measured as the natural logarithm of the collective-mode share of inland passenger transport, across 27 EU member states over 2000–2024. The scope is restricted to inland passenger transport, comprising passenger cars, buses and coaches, and trains. The analysis focuses on three structural determinants: innovation capacity, proxied by gross domestic expenditure on research and development per inhabitant; energy import dependency; and tourism demand, measured by arrivals at tourist accommodation establishments. Given strong cross-sectional dependence and significant slope heterogeneity, the empirical analysis adopts a second-generation panel framework combining fixed effects with Driscoll–Kraay standard errors, the Common Correlated Effects Mean Group estimator, the Augmented Mean Group estimator, and method of moments quantile regression. Cross-sectional augmented Dickey–Fuller tests indicate mixed orders of integration, while Kao and Westerlund tests provide evidence of a stable long-run cointegrating relationship. Across estimators, the estimated effects are consistent in sign: innovation capacity and energy import dependency are associated with a lower collective modal share, whereas tourism demand is associated with a higher one. The Augmented Mean Group elasticities are −0.0689, −0.0901, and 0.0529, respectively. Quantile estimates reveal pronounced distributional asymmetry, with the adverse effect of innovation approximately doubling between the tenth and ninetieth quantiles, while the positive tourism effect progressively weakens and becomes statistically insignificant at the upper end. The findings identify a technology-induced erosion mechanism concentrated in historically high-ridership member states and demonstrate that innovation, without explicit modal-shift orientation, does not necessarily translate into greater collective passenger transport.

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