The Impact of Air Freight and the Human Development Index: The Volume of Freight, Health, Knowledge and Standard of Living Across Countries

Abstract

Existing literature mostly focused on the relationship between freight and standard of living of individual countries (Leite et al., 2022; Sarram & Ivey, 2017). Moreover, many studies merely emphasized the impact of air freight and air quality (Facanha & Horvath, 2007; Ramani, Jaikumar & Charman, 2019), but not the overall quality of living of humans across countries. This current study filled the literature gap by investigating some of the factors that might predict the Human Development Index (HDI) of 94 countries by including air freight as one of the independent variables. The HDI can be seen as the average achievement of three basic aspects of human development, namely health, knowledge and standard of living (United Nations Development Programme, 2023). Three factors were included in the analysis to predict the HDI values: air freight, computers, communication and other services and the number of infant deaths. Air freight involved volume of freight, express and diplomatic bags carried on every freight stage. The results showed that the three independent variables significantly explained approximately 39% of the total variance in the HDI. Though air freight was not the strongest predictor of the HDI, results showed that higher volume of freight was significantly related to higher HDI.