Where Do We Stand on Transport Infrastructure Deregulation and Public-Private Partnership?

The evolution of transport public-private partnerships (PPPs) in developing and developed countries since the early 1990s seems to be following a similar path: private initiatives work for a while but after a shock to the sector takes place the public sector returns as regulator, owner or financier; after a while the public sector runs into problems and eventually finds a hybrid solution to ensure the survival of the sector. This paper reviews the effectiveness of transport infrastructure deregulation from three angles: efficiency, fiscal and users' viewpoint. The paper emphasizes the difficulties and strong political commitments required to make the reforms sustainable and argues that governments willing to make corrections to the reform path are faced with the need to address recurrent and emerging issues in transport systems: tariff structure, quality (timetable, safety, environment), access rules for captive shippers, the trend toward rebundling and decrease in intrasectoral competition, multimodalism and the stimulus through yardstick competition.