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The balancing of sustainability dimensions is the prime agenda of supply chain organisations. The supply chain sustainability greatly influenced by its freight transport activities. Most of the previous work discussed the economic and environmental sustainability of freight transport industry; although the social sustainability (SS) dimension paid less attention to researchers and practitioners of emerging economies. The purpose of this study is to investigate the importance of SS indicators in the freight transport industry. The SS assessment framework is validated with the Indian freight transport industry.

The proposed framework considers four SS dimension and 25 indicators. The SS indicators’ importance varies with the individual company's prospect. Therefore the proposed framework is used in multi-company perspective as well as in industry perspective to present more realistic results. The importance weight of SS dimension and indicators are computed with a novel multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method, i.e. fuzzy best–worst method (FBWM).

The prioritisation of SS indicators in each company perspective is compared with an industry perspective. The contribution to community health and education program is most valuable indicator followed by the prevention of child and forced labour. The model robustness is tested through sensitivity analysis and reported that less variation in indicators’ ranking.

To authors best of knowledge, this is the first study to highlight the importance of SS indicators in the freight transport industry. This study contributes to the sustainability assessment literature by providing a nuanced perception of the SS indicators and put forward managerial implications for improving the SS of the freight transport industry. The proposed framework could be treated as a benchmark for other developing nation's freight transport industry.

More is known about women travelling on public transport than about women working in public transport. This chapter addresses the latter and examines the barriers and challenges both for women as employees and for employers (usually men) employing women. A historical overview of women’s work in transport provides the context for considering more contemporary literature and data on the employment of women in the bus mode as the mode most pervasive in public transport. Primary evidence from two vignettes from the bus industry in New South Wales, Australia, which draw on first-hand experience to highlight some of the barriers and challenges for increasing women’s participation in public transport. Both vignettes reveal the changes that the industry has faced, as well as its ongoing challenges and the benefits of increasing women’s participation in transport work. The experiences from the vignettes highlight the numerous actors involved in making the changes to increase women’s participation – employers, regulators, governments, trade unions and workers themselves. The chapter discussion provides some tentative conclusions for policy and highlights areas for further research.

It is important for stakeholders to understand the driving forces of the aviation industry and economic wellbeing and how these sectors are interconnected. This chapter studies the relationships between the African aviation industry and the economy. It is framed as a causal linkage considering the priority investment sector that enhances the sustainable wellbeing of the society. Analyses were conducted for 38 African countries using time series data from 1981 to 2019. The results show that causal relationships are heterogeneous and context-specific. Four patterns of causal relationships between air travel demand and the economy are identified: unidirectional causality in either directions; bidirectional causality; and indeterminate causal direction. However, the causal direction in any economic or policy-related matter may change with political reforms and changes to economic policy.

European air transport policy, emerged through the confluence of case law and legislation, in four broad areas: liberalization, safety and security, greening, and the external policy. Following the implementation of the single market for air transport, policy shifted to liberalizing and regulating associated services and in recent years to greening, the external aviation policy, and safety and security. Inclusion of air transport in the Environmental Trading Scheme of the European Union exemplifies the European Commission’s proactive stand on bringing the industry in line with emission reduction trajectories of other industries. However, the bid to include flights to third countries in the trading scheme pushed the EU into a controversial position, causing the Commission to halt implementation and to give ICAO time to seek a global multilateral agreement. The chapter also discusses how the nationality clauses in air services agreements breached the Treaty of Rome, and a court ruling to that effect enabled the EC to extend EU liberalization policies beyond the European Union, resulting in the Common Aviation Area with EU fringe countries and the Open Aviation Area with the USA. Another important area of progress was aviation safety, where the EU region is unsurpassed in the world, yet the Commission has pushed the boundary even further, by establishing the European Safety Agency to oversee the European Aviation Safety Management System. Another important area of regulatory development was aviation security, a major focus after the woeful events in 2001, but increasingly under industry scrutiny on costs and effectiveness. The chapter concludes by arguing that in the coming decade, the EU will strive to strengthen its position as a global countervailing power, symbolized in air transport by a leadership position in environmental policy and international market liberalization, exemplified in the EU’s external aviation policy.

The objectives of this paper are to estimate the annual Malmquist TFP(total factor productivity) index of Korea and China’s road freight transport with DEA(data envelope analysis) and to decompose the index into technical efficiency change and technology change. In the process of the estimation, we used labor, capital, and fuel as input factors and ton-km of road freight transport as output factor. The panel data of Korea and China’s road freight transport industry from 1985 to 2004 are used. The results of the analysis show several points. First, there was no significant improvement in China’s TFP growth before 1997, but there was continuous growth in TFP since 1997 because of constantly increasing domestic freight transport demand. Second, there was downward trend in Korea’s TFP, especially there was a large reduction of productivity in 1998 because of the huge reduction of road freight transport demand during the period of the economic crisis. Third, the technology improvements play a significant role in the TFP growth and the technical efficiency had negative effects on the TFP growth of Korea. However, the technology improvements as well as the technical efficiency had positive effects on the TFP growth of China’s road freight transport industry.

This chapter reviews the effects of air transport liberalization, and investigates the roles played by airport-airline vertical arrangements in liberalizing markets. Our investigation concludes that liberalization has led to substantial economic and traffic growth. Such positive outcomes are mainly due to increased competition and efficiency gains in the airline industry, and positive externalities to the overall economy. Liberalization allows airlines to optimize their networks, and thus may introduce substantial demand and financial uncertainty to airports. Vertical arrangements between airlines and airports may offer a wide range of benefits to the parties involved, yet such arrangements could also lead to airline entry barriers which reduce the effects of liberalization. Three approaches have been developed to model the effects of liberalization in complex market conditions, which include the analytical, econometric and computational network methods. These approaches should be selectively utilized in policy studies on liberalization.

The last decade has been a period of considerable change for physical distribution in the UK. Major restructuring has been overdue, often because companies have in the past failed to appreciate the importance of distribution in the marketing process, but now there is a new awareness of the crucial role that distribution can play in the success of companies. As a consequence, innovation in distribution is taking place at an accelerating rate.

Women transport workers are a proud part of the workforce, central to the global economy linking supply chains and keeping the world moving. But the transport industry is highly gendered. Women transport workers are overrepresented in precarious informal work and non-standard forms of employment without social protections, they are underrepresented in leadership and decision-making, and are facing endemic gender-based violence, and sanitation indignity. Women’s jobs in transport are more likely to be vulnerable to the impacts of automation and digitalisation. Responses to the challenges arising from the COVID-19 crisis have the potential to exacerbate existing inequalities.

This chapter argues that it is imperative that the transport industry – including employers, governments, investors, and unions – put into action a gender-responsive approach to ensure that inequalities are not reproduced, perpetuated or intensified, and that there is a ‘gender equal new normal’. Strengthening women’s employment in transport needs to address more than just recruitment, and failure to also address the reality of gender-based violence and other aspects related to decent work risks undermining any interventions to increase women in transport. The International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) continues to prioritise work to improve the status and working lives of women in transport. Through policy and innovative action programmes – including union organising, campaigning, collective bargaining, developing women’s activism and leadership, and building strategic alliances – the chapter shows how the ITF is supporting women transport workers, through their trade unions, to address their most significant industrial and workplace issues, to shape, and lead the struggle for equality.

This study aims to explore the role of knowledge management practices in supporting current and emerging passengers’ and customer needs, aiming to create value. Specifically, the research examines the importance of customer-centred knowledge management in the delivery of innovative services and practices in the public transport sector, promoting the role of interactions between mobility stakeholders and travellers.

A theoretical framework is developed and supported by the background literature on customer-centric knowledge management approaches, business model innovation, as well as on inter-organisational and network co-operations.

Results show that the development of sustainable innovation and technologies in the transport sector requires knowledge management practices, which enable the access to knowledge about users’ needs, the mapping and evaluation of innovative knowledge, the promotion of knowledge-based innovation through collective approaches, as well as the acquisition and integration of new knowledge.

The conceptual framework developed in the paper remains limited to a theoretical understanding. Further research should empirically examine knowledge issues related to the intangible character and intellectual capital intensiveness of innovation in the transport sector.

Researchers, public transport companies and public transport authorities are expected to benefit from this research, by developing mechanisms for customer-centred knowledge management, which is found to lead to innovative services and practices in the public transport sector. Another practical implication regards the adoption of knowledge management practices, leading to technological innovations in public transport, and advancing the level of sustainability in transport systems.

The originality of this study lies in the development of a customer-focussed knowledge management framework, which provides a novel perspective of value creation in an attempt to engage researchers and practitioners from the transport industry in the conceptualisation and development of innovative solutions.