Automobile use in small island developing states

Islands are attractive to researchers because they are detached, self-contained entities with obvious boundaries. From a geographers’ perspective, this has long been recognised as a distinct advantage, with islands effectively ‘functioning as small-scale spatial laboratories where theories can be tested and processes observed in the setting of a semi-closed system’ (King, 1993). However, one relatively unexplored island research area concerns the development of transport, and the growth of car-borne mobility worldwide. This paper therefore examines the influence of the car in 45 small island development states – as defined by the United Nations - from 14 different regions using a simple linear multiple least squares regression analysis. Under this cross sectional process, car mobility was tested against factors including gross domestic product, population, vehicle ownership, road length, and urbanisation, data for which was obtained from a range of primary and secondary sources. Overall, the analysis showed a strong relationship between increased mobility and increased GDP, while other factors which appeared to be important included population density and vehicles per road length. Various linear regression methods gave similar but slightly different results and these are explained more fully in the text.