Economic Analysis and Policy Evaluation in the Railway Industry: An International Perspective provides a systematic description of key topics of modern rail systems. Contributors evaluate the economic effects of forces shaping railway and transportation industries worldwide. The book covers a description of the recent evolution of the sector emphasizing those countries or areas where railways have achieved different degrees of development. Economic concepts, techniques and applied empirical models are considered to illustrate the different aspects of the rail markets. The assessment of regulatory, competition and infrastructure issues related to rail markets are also described with detail. Assesses the economics of restructuring, competition policy, pricing and investments in rail markets Provides insights to understadn the behaviour of rail markets Illustrates the opportunities and risks of various regulatory policies

The passage of the Staggers Rail Act in 1980 led brought a renaissance to the freight rail industry. In the decade following, economists documented the effects of the Act on a variety of important economic metrics including prices, costs, and productivity. Over the preceding years, and with the return of the industry to more stable footing, attention to the industry by economists faded. The lack of attention, however, has not been due to a dearth of ongoing economic and policy issues that continue to confront the industry. In this volume, we begin to rectify this inattention. Rather than retread older analyses or provide yet another look at the consequences of Staggers, we assemble a collection of ten chapters in four sections that collectively provide fresh and up-to-date analyses of the economic issues and policy challenges the industry faces: the first section sets the context through foundational discussion of freight rail; the second section highlights the role of freight rail in an increasingly interrelated economy; the third section examines industry structure and scope in freight rail; and the fourth section assesses current regulatory challenges that confront freight rail. This book will be of great value to researchers, academics, policymakers, and students interested in the fields of freight rail economics and policy, transportation, business history, and regulatory economics.

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The book, first published in 1977, contrasts new and older approaches to the history of transport and outlines a critical exposition of the methods used to quantify the contribution of railways to economic growth by means of counterfactual speculation and the measurement of social savings. The author also outlines and appraises an alternative measure of the impact of railways, namely the social rate of return on capital invested in railways. The final chapters are concerned with the effects on growth generated by the construction and diffusion of railways through expenditure on labour, capital goods and industrial inputs and through their effects on the integration of markets, and patterns of location.

For close to 100 years, America's surface freight industries, primarily rail and trucking, operated under the protective wing of the U.S. government. In 1980 Congress, finding vast inefficiencies in the two industries, substantially deregulated both, opening them at last to market competition. Deregulation has brought with it many changes—for firms within the industries, for their labor force, and for shippers and their customers. Clifford Winston, Thomas M. Corsi, Curtis M. Grimm, and Carol A Evans provide a comprehensive evaluation of the effect of the deregulation legislation on the rail and trucking industries. According to the authors, deregulation has made substantial progress in solving the two most vexing problems of the surface freight transportation industry—excessive rates in the trucking industry and insufficient returns on investment in the rail industry. Competition and efficiency have returned to both industries, and although the labor force in each has suffered wage and job losses, shippers and their customers have gained roughly $20 billion a year in benefits. The authors recommend policies that would continue to promote competition and the efficient use of highway and railway infrastructure.