Can we use transport accounts for pricing policy and distributional analysis?

The paper analyses several possible concepts for transport accounts. First, it considers business type of transport accounts. It is shown that in general these are not a good guide for transport policy. Next, the paper examines the potential of social transport accounts and sees to what extent they can be used to analyse the efficiency and equity effects of transport policy. It is argued that one should be careful in interpreting the social transport accounts, since they do not contain all information necessary for a social cost-benefit analysis of transport policy. For a complete evaluation a set of more extended accounts, the so-called welfare accounts, should be used for all relevant markets, not only the transport markets. Examining the equity effects requires a disaggregation of the welfare accounts' contents according to income group.