Achieving
the Millennium Development Goals for
Workshop,
Linking Transport to Employment
Creation and Poverty Reduction
Presentation by
Professor Ronald W. McQuaid
Employment Research Institute and
Transport Research Institute
r.mcquaid@napier.ac.uk
This short presentation briefly
considers two issues:
first, the accessibility of urban
residents to employment; and
second, some potential implications
of changing global transport costs for achieving the Millennium Development
Goals for
1.
Accessibility of urban residents to employment
1.1 According to the Transport and
MDG report (2004) slums are “believed to be home already to 80% of urban
populations in most Sub-Sahara African countries and continue to expand.
Community efforts to upgrade local roads and paths, and to secure more adequate
transport services from the slum area to places of employment and social
services, need active support.”
Different transport systems will
have different impacts on different types of people and jobs. Do the MDG
indictors take this into account sufficiently?
1.2 Arguments for increasing
accessibility for slum residents to employment opportunities through transport
improvements include:
efficiency (improving the match
between the best skilled etc. worker and a job; or increasing the supply of
workers where there are unfilled vacancies; improving the productivity at work
of employees through easing their journey to work; etc.);
equity; and
other benefits (e.g. complementary
accesses to essential and other services etc.).
1.3 However, equity is, arguably,
inadequately treated in the broad indicators of the Transport and MDG report
(2004). Accessibility to employment for
slum residents will depend upon labor demand and labor supply factors, as well
as transport issues, with significant equity implications.
·
Labor Demand side – the characteristics of jobs on
offer by employers affect who will apply for or take a job and how far they are
willing or able to travel to a job (e.g. sector, location of employer, wages,
working hours and flexibility, discrimination etc.) In addition, during job search, the flow of
information between employer and job seeker is influenced by distance, with
different communication channels between being used at different times in the
search process and for different types of jobs.
·
Labor supply side - the employability of slum residents
will be affected by factors (Rouwendal and Rietveld, 1994) such as their: individual
characteristics (skills and attributes etc.), including gender (Grieco, 2002);
and their personal circumstances (contextual
socioeconomic factors related to individuals’ social and household
circumstances that affect their ability to get a job, such as caring
responsibilities etc.), which may include transport-mobility issues such as
access private transport, ability to walk appropriate distances to work etc.,
as well as mental maps of where they might seek work, whereby some ethnic
groups may avoid areas dominated by other ethnic groups or that are perceived
as being dangerous).
·
Residents’ willingness and ability to travel longer
distances (or for longer time) to employment, and hence the size of the sets of jobs they can apply to or remain
in, will be affected by overlapping factors such as: wages, education
and skill levels, caring responsibilities (especially young children) and age
(this may be bi-modal with shorter commuting times for the youngest and oldest
workers) etc.
·
The forms, characteristics (time, safety, convenience,
cost, availability) and alternatives of particular types of transport will also
fundamentally affect people’s willingness and ability to find, get and sustain
employment. There are also correlations between individual characteristics and
likelihood to access different transport types (e.g. gender may generally more
likely to be linked closely to safety issues).
1.4 Two of the issues that arise
are[1]:
Equity arguments - If we only consider
equity in terms of whether or not people are slum residents, we are potentially
in danger of not adequately considering the major disadvantage of certain
sub-groups within this group (e.g. those caring for young children – mostly
females). By focusing the indicators on
households[2]
rather than individuals, this may disguise these intra-slum resident groups
(e.g. the head of household may have fewer transport barriers, but within the
household barriers may not have changed, or may indeed have increased, for
other members). So the measurement of “%
of households (in the various urban living environments) which report transport
costs and time as major obstacles to employment” must take account of
intra-household variation. Otherwise an apparent improvement may disguise deterioration
for the most disadvantaged. Effective accessibility planning (to identify how
accessible employment and services are for different groups) is needed (e.g.
DfT, 2004). Intra-group variation and the problems of aggregation must be
explicitly considered.
Spatial mismatch - Overall, within
a metropolitan area, some jobs (generally high human capital or high skill
jobs) are likely to have a single relatively geographically frictionless labor
market. While for other jobs or job seekers (generally the less skilled such as
most slum dwellers and/or, for example, workers who are constrained due to
household responsibilities or can only work part-time), there are likely to be
significant levels of both skill and spatial mismatch or other barriers to
getting a job (Holzer, 1991). The degree of “skills” and
“spatial” mismatch in a local or metropolitan labor market will be contingent
upon the characteristics of the local economy, employers, job seekers, the jobs
being considered, as well as transport and job search and job support
infrastructure. Greater research on the causes, consequences and importance of
mismatches in the labor market are needed.
2.
Changing Global Transport and the MDG
2.1 Transport is a necessary, but
not sufficient, condition for economic development and employment growth. There are important distinctions between
transport system improvements which affect international, inter-regional,
intra-regional and local linkages and development, although these are often not
disaggregated in studies.
Benefits to transport users that
are related to employment include easier access to work and access to new work
opportunities for individuals. For employers, benefits include access to
greater employment, suppliers and demand markets, together with reduced
transport costs, increased productivity and improved reliability, and hence
lower risk. There may also be
significant impacts on land uses and prices. Conversely, there may be increased
traffic generation, production changes and mode switching. Such collateral effects arise due to the
influence of accessibility on the local (or national) level of demand. Further,
transport infrastructure may help attract inward investment (from abroad or
from elsewhere in the country), or stimulate local industry (DfT, 2003). This may lead to local in-migration or
greater commuting, hence possibly increasing local travel. However, there is limited understanding of
people’s behavior, and in particular the detailed mechanisms and issues that affect
decisions by people and businesses. The
degree to which the MDGs reflect these various issues varies and their
disaggregation may be useful in some cases.[3]
2.2 To take one particular issue: while
there are a number of potential implications of changing global transport costs
for achieving the Millennium Development Goals for Africa, one is the changing
nature of container shipping and costs. There
has been massive recent growth in container port traffic (Baird, 2006). Much of
this growth has by-passed
|
World Container Port Traffic |
|
|
Million 20 foot Containers (teu) |
|
|
1980 |
38.8 |
|
1990 |
87.9 |
|
2000 |
235.4 |
|
2005 |
394.9 |
Note: TEU
= twenty-foot equivalent container units.
In addition, the cost of container
shipping continues to fall (although recent fuel price increases will have an
impact), suggesting greater relative disadvantage to inland countries and to
those not in easy access to major container terminals. The early container ships (1950s-60s),
converted from cargo ships and tankers, carried around 500-800 teu, the second cellular ships (1970s) carried 100-2500 teu, the third generation Panamax class (1980s) carried 3-4000 teu, while the post-Pananax classes
(1988-2000) carried 4-5,000 and the next generation may carry 5-8,000 teu and before 2010 ships and the Emma Mearsk in 2006 had a
capacity of 14,500 teu are anticipated.
The costs have fallen greatly – to perhaps Euro 0.014 per container mile
on the larger ships (Rodrigue et
al, 2006). They argue that container traffic growth has followed the
standard technological
diffusion (logistics) "S" shaped curve (which would is projected to
continue its growth phase until around 2010 and then move into the maturity
stage).
2.3 Although the cost reductions of
will depend upon the actual operation of the ships, but there are large
economies of scale (particularly linked to hub-and-spoke operations) (Cullinane and Khanna,
1999). This is
likely to further disadvantage many African countries and further
research is required into the changing transport costs for goods. Although the
implications of changing global transport costs need to be further emphasized
in the MDG indicators, greater understanding of their impacts is required.
References
Baird A. (2006) Optimising
the container transhipment hub location in northern
Cullinane, K. and M. Khanna (1999)) Economies of Scale in Large Containerships, Journal of Transport Economics and Policy 33, 185-207.
DfT 2004. Accessibility Planning GGuidance. Department for Transport:
DfT (2003) The Importance of Transport in Business’ Location Decisions - Scoping Study, Research Report by McQuaid, R.W., M. Greig, A. Smyth and J. Cooper. At:
http://www.dft.gov.uk/stellent/groups/dft_science/documents/page/dft_science_027294.hcsp
Grieco, M. 2002. Gender, social innclusion and rural infrastructure
services, Report to World Bank,
http://www.oocities.org/transport_and_society/ruralinclusion.html
Hilling, D. (1996) Transport and ddeveloping countries. Routledge:
Holzer HJ (1991) The spatial mismaatch hypothesis: what has the evidence shown. Urban Studies 28:105–122.
Rodrigue, J-P, Slack, B. and C. Coomtois (2006) The Geography of
Transport Systems. Routledge:
Russo, G., Reitveld, P., Nijkamp, P., and C. Gorter, 1996. Spatial aspects of Recruitment Behaviour of Firms: an Empirical Investigation. Environment and Planning A 28, 1077-1093.
[1] Other important issues include: much of the literature is based on
developed countries and so may have insufficient regard to the socio-economic,
spatial and temporal contexts (Hilling, 1996); the complexity and
inter-relatedness of factors means that it is often difficult to unpack
individual effects fully. This brief
presentation does not considering employment related to transport
infrastructure construction and operation include ancillary activities such as
vehicle maintenance and indirect employment supported by transport
developments.
[2] MDG 7 - Environmental sustainability. One of the targets: Share of urban
residents for whom mobility problems severely constrain access to employment
and essential services halved. One of the indicators: % of households (in the
various urban living environments) which report transport costs and time as
major obstacles to employment. (This is closely linked to other MDGs such as MDG
1 target of Access to inputs and markets, and generation of employment
opportunities, improved by halving the proportion of rural population living
beyond 2 km of an all-season road).
[3] MDG 1 - Eradication of extreme poverty and hunger. Targets: The difference in average transport cost between Africa and