The effect of low-emission mobility strategy by the European Commission on the competitiveness of global trade activity in EU Countries

This research paper aims to understand the effect of low-emission mobility strategy released by the European Commission towards the trade activity in the EU countries. The engagement of the EU in Paris Agreement has led to the implementation of several policies to achieve the goal of maintaining the global temperature change well below 2°C. Therefore, the European Commission published the low-emission strategy that consists of digitalization initiatives, the multi-modality transport pricing (taxes or penalties), and other fuels infrastructure improvements. However, this is feared to hamper the global trade activities as the trade highly depends on transportation usage. The data to observe the central topic of this paper is collected from Eurostat database from 2010 to 2017, with cross-section analysis being performed. The result indicates that there is a negative relation between the low-emission mobility strategy and trade growth. Nonetheless, the effect of this strategy is not proved to be significantly different in each region (Western Europe; Eastern Europe) and amongst the different type of traded goods (manufactured goods; services). However, this analysis is performed under several limitations that could be incorporated for future recommendations.