Interrelation of external costs of road transport and financial and logistics indicators of the EU countries

Internal costs refer to the direct monetised costs for a person or organisation undertaking an activity. They are costs that a business bases its price on. External costs are not included in price and consist on the cost of disposing of the product at the end of its useful life, the environmental degradation caused by the emissions, pollutants and wastes from production, the cost of health problems caused by harmful materials and ingredients and social costs associated with increasing unemployment due to increasing automation. In such way, external costs or externalities refer to the economic concept of uncompensated social or environmental effects. The countries of the European Union have long been engaged in converting indirect losses from transport into financial units. The latest existing 2019 Handbook on External Costs of Transport considers not only marginal external costs, but also total and average external transport costs across the EU, Switzerland and Norway. Our goals in this research are: - identification of factors that have a significant impact on the total external costs of transport at the country level; - determining of the degree of such influence; - determination of interdependence (multicollinearity) of factors of influence; - determination of the direction of influence (direct or inverse dependence); - making conclusions regarding the possibility of determining the external costs of the country based on the selected factors. On the basis of correlation-regression analysis, factors were determined that have a clear relationship with the external costs of road transport - the country's GDP, the amount of transport work produced by the country in tkm and the amount invested in road infrastructure. Values of Multiple R and R-square of the regression model (very next to 1) allow us to make a conclusion that these three factors are sufficient to explain the variable (external costs) at a reliability level of 95%. All factors are statistically significant and should be involved in the model. Another important result is the sign with which the coefficients are present in the model: with an increase in % of GDP and transport work, external costs will increase, however, with an increase in investment in road infrastructure, the value of external costs of transport will decrease. Finally, the regression equation of the country's external transport costs as a function of the three aforementioned indicators was obtained. A very good representation of the statistical data with the resulting regression model can be observed. It can be assumed that this model can be used to predict external costs of road transport and transfer the methodology to countries outside the EU, for example, Ukraine..