Privatization And Regulation Of Transport Infrastructure In The 1990s

"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.

Learning to regulate fair ...

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.

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.

The ECMT Round Table examines the effects and limitations of regulating transport services and examines in particular the factors that necessitate regulation, the role of transaction costs, and the cost of regulation.

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.