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Numerous countries have attempted to improve the performance of
their railways by introducing more competition, but there is fierce
debate and no consensus on how this is best achieved. This book
reveals how railways were an obvious target for reform because they
were often losing traffic and money, and because the government was
typically deeply involved as either owner or regulator. This book
summarizes and assesses the evidence from the experiences of rail
reform in Europe, Latin America, and the United States. In short,
the book reveals that no one approach has proven to be best across
a wide variety of circumstances. It highlights how unbundling
(separating infrastructure from train operations so that
independent train operators could compete over common tracks)
although attractive in theory, has so far proved complex to
implement and delivered only some of the promised benefits.
Privatization and deregulation have had more demonstrated success
in the freight systems of North and South America, but are still
largely untested in the more complex railway networks of Europe.
The evidence is arguably slightly stronger for privatization and
deregulation than for unbundling, but the jury is still out.
Competition in the Railway Industry is invaluable in that it
compares the strategies and experiences of different countries in
introducing competition in railways, rather than simply focusing on
one country and its approach. As such, it will appeal greatly to
those in industry and government interested in railway policy and
performance, and privatization and deregulation of utilities more
generally. It will also appeal to academics and researchers of
public sector, transport and industrial organization.
In the last decade many countries turned to private sources to
provide services formerly offered by public agencies. Europeans,
particularly the British and the French, were leaders in this
movement. Developing countries also experimented extensively with
privatization in the 1980s, with varying degrees of success.
Because governments around the world are heavily involved in
transportation, it is a natural focus of privatization experiments
and in many ways has been at the cutting edge. Going Private
examines the diverse privatization experiences of transportation
services and facilities. Cases are drawn from the United States,
Asia, Europe, and Latin America. Since almost every country has
experimented to some degree with highway and bus privatization, the
authors focus particularly on these services, although they also
discuss urban rail transit and airports. Highways and buses, they
explain, encompass all three of the most common and basic forms of
privatization: The sale of an existing state-owned enterprise; use
of private, rather than public, financing and management for new
infrastructure development; and contracting out to private vendors
public services previously provided by government employees. After
thoroughly examining these services and discussing the motives for,
and objections to, privatization, the authors look at the prospects
for privatization in other sectors and industries. They assess
those circumstances in which privatization is most likely to
succeed and those in which it is most likely to fail, for political
as well as economic reasons. The authors conclude that
privatization involves many political and social as well as
economic dimensions. Privatization isusually not simply a matter of
efficiency improvements or capital augmentation but also involves
such deeply imbedded societal concerns as equity, income transfers,
environmental problems, and attitudes toward taxation and the role
of government.
In the 1980s and '90s many countries turned to the private sector
to provide infrastructure and utilities, such as gas, telephones,
and highways--with the idea that market-based incentives would
control costs and improve the quality of essential services. But
subsequent debacles including the collapse of California's
wholesale electricity market and the bankruptcy of Britain's
largest railroad company have raised troubling questions about
privatization. This book addresses one of the most vexing of these:
how can government fairly and effectively regulate "natural
monopolies"--those infrastructure and utility services whose
technologies make competition impractical?
Rather than sticking to economics, Jose Gomez-Ibanez draws on
history, politics, and a wealth of examples to provide a road map
for various approaches to regulation. He makes a strong case for
favoring market-oriented and contractual approaches--including
private contracts between infrastructure providers and customers as
well as concession contracts with the government acting as an
intermediary--over those that grant government regulators
substantial discretion. Contracts can provide stronger protection
for infrastructure customers and suppliers--and greater
opportunities to tailor services to their mutual advantage. In some
cases, however, the requirements of the firms and their customers
are too unpredictable for contracts to work, and alternative
schemes may be needed.
Over the past two decades Americans have become increasingly
skeptical about the benefits of community growth and hostile to new
taxes--while continuing to demand improvements in local services.
One response to this tension has been a burgeoning movement to
raise public revenue by regulating growth. In this timely book, the
authors explain that most growing localities now require private
developers to finance public improvements as a condition for
receiving permits to build. These permit conditions, known as
"exactions," are most commonly used to ensure that infrastructure
capacity will be adequate to serve the occupants of new real estate
developments and to lessen the harmful effects of these
developments on other local citizens. Exactions are often used to
finance new roads, water and waste disposal facilities, and public
open space, but some communities have begun to require developer
financing for such services as day care, job training, low-cost
housing, and ride sharing. The authors see the dramatic growth of
exaction financing as an epochal shift in the character of American
land use regulation. A function once isolated from the local
government mainstream is now close to heart of fiscal and public
works decisionmaking. Politicians find exactions an extremely
valuable tactic for resolving land use conflict. Lawyers and
developers worry about how to establish appropriate limits on the
use of exaction, economists debate their equity and efficiency, and
planners consider their effect on urban reform. Regulation for
Revenue offers an integrated appraisal of exaction financing,
showing that exactions come in many forms and that they can be
meaningfully evaluated only by comparison with realistic
alternatives. These include growth restrictions, tolerance of
infrastructure overload, and increased tax and user charges.
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