The hypothesis tested in this paper is that land transport is a sector that is oversized in Tenerife. To demonstrate this, an exercise based on a fiscal accounting procedure is applied to land transport using an ecological economics approach. This fiscal accounting exercise is intended to demonstrate the differences between government revenue and the expenditure through the entire cycle of the transport sector. The results show that: a) expenditure surpasses revenue by nearly €21 million; b) road transport is indirectly subsidised (despite claims from the automotive sector); c) investments in the private transport sector are much larger than in public transport (despite claims from the government). The main limitation detected concerns data collection difficulties. The main contribution of this paper is the application of a fiscal accounting approach to one small island, Tenerife (Canary Islands).
