Post-recession automobile demand: The shift from the West to emerging economies

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Résumé:

The paper describes in a first section the shift of global automobile demand from the developed to the emergent economies since the Great Recession of 2007-2009. It shows that far from being a short-term effect from the recession it reflects a structural shift of global demand to emerging economies mostly from Asia. In a second section, the paper investigates the role of income inequality to explain this structural change of global automobile demand and analyses the impact of other factors such as the level of households’ consumption, population density and the degree of urbanisation to explain car density which is used as a proxy of automobile demand. A simple econometric investigation is realised to confirm the impact of each of these variables. In section 3, the paper comments the results with case studies at national level and refine the analysis of the primary and secondary markets, the role of demographics and the financing of car ownership. Section four concludes.