Automobile use within selected island states

Transport use in island states shares many of the same characteristics as other developing countries, but with added complications of geographic isolation and lack of capital for many islanders. This paper examines the influence of the automobile in 45 Small Island Developing States (SIDS), as defined by the United Nations, using multiple regression techniques. Under these cross sectional processes, car based mobility is tested against factors including gross domestic product, population, vehicle ownership, road length, and urbanisation, data for which is obtained from a range of primary and secondary sources for a subset of 38 island states. The analysis shows a strong relationship between increased mobility and increased GDP, while other factors which appear to be important included population density and vehicles per unit road length. The model results are then compared and contrasted with average apparent global mobility figures from a much larger set of countries, and this shows that mobility is significantly lower (almost half) that of comparably wealthy non SIDS.