A Decade of Changes in the Transportation of Passengers: What are the Factors that Affected the Demand?

Abstract

Ten years of financial stability in Brazilian economy have gone. In this period, the regional transportation of passengers suffered exogenous impacts: economical crises, airport crises and great proportions' accidents, as well as impacts which were intern to the system: institutional changes (liberation of tariff promotions, many companies establishing themselves and also coming to bankruptcy), creation of regulating institutions in the air transportation as well as the land transportation. Theoretically, it is expected that these changes have generated impacts in the demand for trips, since an environment regulated with more flexible prices and higher amounts of companies would generate a competitive environment in which the companies could struggle to attract their demand. On the other hand, the impacts which are exogenous to the system can generate responses in the sense of restoring the balance of demand. Thus, based on the theoretical experience, this article aims at analyzing empirically, through categorical variables, if there were impacts on the demand for regional trips in Brazil due to the internal or external changes. In order to perform this, monthly data from January, 1999 to December, 2009 are utilized and estimates are calculated making use of Seemingly Unrelated Regressions (SUR). As a result we have the meaning of the internal and external impacts related to air and land transports, identifying that the worldwide economic crisis generated an impact at the level of the demand for transportation and also that the flexibility of tariffs allowed by ANTT had an equal impact on the demand for land transportation.