This Round Table examines the role of the state in a deregulated transport market and provides reports on deregulation in ECMT countries.

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 report identifies potential improvements in terms of more effective safety and environmental regulation for trucks, backed by better systems of enforcement, and identifies opportunities for greater efficiency and higher productivity.

Road safety is generally a mixture of three components, namely, the road, the vehicle and the driver, or, as also referred to by the ECMT, the infrastructure, the vehicle and human behaviour. Promotion of road safety is more and more possible only through a larger scope of interest -- environment, sustainability, and quality of life. In the future, an efficient road transport system should provide a safe and sustainable accessibility. The idea of organising a seminar came from a presentation by a Swedish representative of the "Vision Zero" programme, adopted by the Swedish Parliament in autumn 1997. The basic idea of "Vision Zero" is that no person should be killed or seriously and permanently impaired in a road traffic accident. At the invitation of the Czech authorities, the seminar was held in March 2002 in Prague. Many governmental and non governmental organisations responsible for road safety policies and work participated in the event.