Road Freight Traffic and Manufacturing Activity: Evidence from the Greek Crisis

This paper presents a toll index for Greece, representing the monthly traffic intensity of truck vehicles across urban and interurban highway toll stations. The study period spans the unique recession of the Greek economy during 2008-2016. We employ Autoregressive Distributed Lag models at levels and error-correction form to explore both the short- and long-run responses of manufacturing activity to the toll index. The findings show significant short-run responses in a two-month period, suggesting the utility of the toll index for near-term economic forecasting.