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Resulting from the 21st UN Climate Change Conference (COP21) in Paris in 2015, the European Union's (EU) current climate and energy objective is to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 40% below 1990 levels by 2030, and transportation must play a vital role in achieving this target. Decarbonization is therefore one of the main challenges for the freight transport sector in Europe. Several measures are suggested to contribute to this goal, including clean vehicle technologies, optimising networks and modal shift. This paper focuses on the latter measure; specifically, we reveal the value of shift-share analysis as a method for assessing a freight modal shift's contribution to carbon dioxide (CO2) emission reduction. The shift-share method is in fact a decomposition analysis that originated in the field of regional economics. However, it can also be applied in other fields, including transport economics. We have exploited this method's broad applicability to develop a tool that can evaluate how rail and inland waterway transport perform in terms of their contributions to CO2 emission reduction due to a modal shift. In demonstrating the tool, we analyse the market for freight transport that has the Netherlands as an origin, destination or both, thereby distinguishing between five distance markets. The goal of this paper is to present and show the value of the tool. The tool can provide policy makers with background information about the changes in CO2 emissions of a freight transport modal shift that occurred in the past, which in turn can be helpful in devising future transport policies. A particular strength of the tool is that it can be used on any spatial scale - countries, regions, corridors, etc. In addition, the data requirements and computing complexity of the shift-share method is low.