"Understanding the Drivers of Electric Vehicle Demand: A Cross-Country Analysis"

The global transformation toward sustainable mobility has made Electric Vehicles (EVs) an important tool for decreasing transport-related emissions. Yet EV adoption rates are not homogeneous and differ across countries, shaped by many economic, political, and infrastructural conditions. This thesis focuses on the factors affecting EV Market Share using a panel dataset consisting of 38 countries over a ten-year period from 2013 until 2023. A fixed-effects regression framework has been chosen in order to control for country-specific heterogeneity and examine the role of income, income inequality, public charging infrastructure, EV-supportive policies, and gasoline prices. The obtained results show that higher income levels and availability of public charging points significantly increase EV adoption, while inequality does not display a direct effect on Market Share. Gasoline prices are also a strong driver, with increasing prices accelerating the shift away from traditional internal combustion vehicles. The effectiveness of EV-supportive policies resulted as uneven: in high-income countries they complement each other with gasoline price signals and already established baseline infrastructure, while in low-income contexts the infrastructural investment show stronger results than policies. Robustness checks reveal an inverted-U relationship between charger density and EV Market Share, suggesting diminishing returns in wealthier regions, while no saturation point is observed in lower-income countries. These results emphasize that EV adoption is shaped by both structural and socioeconomic contexts. The study provides empirical evidence that strategic decisions should be tailored by optimizing the location of infrastructure and proposing related incentives in high-income regions, and prioritizing infrastructure expansion in low-income regions, to accelerate the global EV transition.