The current issue of the Review of Network Economics is a special issue on
"Railroad Industry Structure, Competition, and Investment", guest edited by Guido Friebel, Marc Ivaldi and Gerard McCullough. The special issue includes nine papers selected from those presented at the Stockholm School of Economics in October 2005, at the occasion of the third of a series of annual railroad conferences. The papers reflect the increasing interest of economists to better understand the fundamental challenges the industry is faced with in an era of increasing competition between transportation modes, liberalization, market integration, private public partnerships, and infrastructure regulation. We wish to sincerely thank Professor Friebel and Professor Ivaldi for their considerable effort in putting together this excellent issue. Below we have included a short summary of the issue by Professor Guido.
The papers in this special issue cover a broad range of methods from institutional studies over the analysis of micro data sets and case studies to theoretical analyses of regulatory challenges and structural econometrics. They present evidence from countries as diverse as Spain, Sweden, Germany, and the U.S.
Campos, and Alexandersson and Hulten provide institutional overviews on two important European economies, Spain and Sweden, which have taken different approaches in making their rail sector ready for the challenges of a more integrated European transportation market.
Lalive and Schmutzler give some background on the German reforms and make an attempt to measure the effect of competition in the regional rail markets, using a unique data set on South West Germany. Johnson and Nash present a simulation method for allocating scarce slots, an important issue for getting competition on track right.
Hultcrantz et al provide a study on the private public partnership of the Arlanda link between the airport and the city of Stockholm, Sweden. Resor and coauthors describe the design of a successful private public partnership in the U.S.
Agrell and Pouyet present a theoretical analysis of competition between regulators. De Borger et al. look at a related problem of infrastructure strategy in the European Union.
Finally, Ivaldi and McCullough's paper provides an estimate of the potential costs of separation of infrastructure and operations. While the paper uses U.S. data, it points to a number of important issues for the future of the European rail market.
Co-editors: John Panzar and Julian Wright
To
table of contents
