Policy Evaluation Studies in City Logistics: A Review of the Literature

Evaluating city logistics policies is a task of crucial importance, but it is not an easy one. The reasons are both theoretical and practical. We reviewed 61 papers dealing with the evaluation of city logistics policies on the basis of 12 criteria: policy considered, methodology, evaluation type, feasibility type, stakeholders’ identification, analysis of conflicting goals among stakeholders, costs and benefits, performance measures, data issues, contextual description, supply chain description, and identification of the supply chain leader. On the positive side, we find that there is a large number of available methodologies, an increasing number of data sources, and growing attention to the identification of the stakeholders and their conflicting goals. However, the feasibility analysis is mainly focused on economic aspects rather than technical or operational ones. The identification of the costs and benefits is highly heterogeneous among the studies reviewed, with insufficient connection to the impacted stakeholders. Many different performance indicators are used while a multi-criteria evaluation is still not common. On the negative side, we find that ex-ante evaluation studies prevail by far over the ex-post ones, and that the interaction between city logistic policies and the organization and efficiency of the supply chains has so far received little attention.