"Learning to regulate fairly, effectively, and at arm's length may be the main challenge governments face in attracting private investment and financing to the transport sector"--Cover.

The 1990s saw an increase in the liberalisation of transport policies and a strengthening of the role of private operators and investors in transport infrastructure worldwide. The search for sustained improvement in efficiency is probably secondary to the need to find additional financing, but it is improvement in services that is at the core of the new role of the government in transport. Governments must now become fair economic regulators of many of the privately operated transport services and infrastructures. This book examines the major challenges that governments are likely to face in taking on their new role in transport.

Learning to regulate fair ...

Electricity, natural gas, telecommunications, railways, and water supply, are often vertically and horizontally integrated state monopolies. This results in weak services, especially in developing and transition economies, and for poor people. Common problems include low productivity, high costs, bad quality, insufficient revenue, and investment shortfalls. Many countries over the past two decades have restructured, privatized and regulated their infrastructure. This report identifies the challenges involved in this massive policy redirection. It also assesses the outcomes of these changes, as well as their distributional consequences for poor households and other disadvantaged groups. It recommends directions for future reforms and research to improve infrastructure performance, identifying pricing policies that strike a balance between economic efficiency and social equity, suggesting rules governing access to bottleneck infrastructure facilities, and proposing ways to increase poor people's access to these crucial services.

This timely new edition of Kenneth A. Small’s seminal textbook Urban Transportation Economics, co-authored with Erik T. Verhoef, has been fully updated, covering new areas such as parking policies, reliability of travel times, and the privatization of transportation services, as well as updated treatments of congestion modelling, environmental costs, and transit subsidies. Rigorous in approach and making use of real-world data and econometric techniques, it contains case studies from a range of countries including congestion charging in Norway, Singapore and the UK, light rail in the Netherlands and freeway tolls in the US. Small and Verhoef cover all basic topics needed for any application of economics to transportation: forecasting the demand for transportation services under alternative policies measuring all the costs including those incurred by users setting prices under practical constraints choosing and evaluating investments in basic facilities designing ways in which the private and public sectors interact to provide services. This book will be of great interest to students with basic calculus and some knowledge of economic theory who are engaged with transportation economics, planning and, or engineering, travel demand analysis, and many related fields. It will also be essential reading for researchers in any aspect of urban transportation.

IBSS is the essential tool for librarians, university departments, research institutions and any public or private institution whose work requires access to up-to-date and comprehensive knowledge of the social sciences.

This book addresses the key challenges of balancing economic growth, poverty alleviation, and environmental protection in the development of major physical infrastructure, ranging from transport to energy.

This overview of issues that regulators should be aware of in demand forecasting discusses challenges that come with the decision to privatize transport, the perverse incentives introduced when privatization teams use strategic demand forecasts to evaluate assets, the most common problems with demand forecasting, the reasons that demand forecasting matters, and how to think about demand forecasting in the context of regulation.

This book offers new insights into the theory and practice of economic airport regulation. In light of recent developments in aviation markets and policy, and the debate on airport regulation and benchmarking, it offers case studies on various aspects of economic regulation of city and regional airports. Written by experts in the field, the volume features contributions on the theory of regulation and benchmarking, as well as case studies on recent experiences in Europe and Latin America. This book is divided into three parts: Part I provides the theoretical background for the study of airport regulation and regulatory systems. Competition at airports is discussed, as are common forms of regulation and potential pitfalls. Part II addresses benchmarking, as benchmarking is often applied as an input to the regulatory process. Although benchmarking is necessary, reviews of how benchmarking is applied in the literature and in practice show that improvements can be made. Part III provides case studies on real-world examples. Addressing the question of whether and how European airport regulators set incentives for efficiency, and how benchmarking is used in the regulatory process, this book is an important contribution to the development of the transport industry in Europe and Latin America. It will appeal to scholars and students in transport economics, regional economics and related fields, as well as to practitioners and policy makers in the transport industry.