Decompositions of productivity indices contribute to our understanding of what drives the observed productivity changes by providing a detailed picture of their constituents. This paper presents the most comprehensive decomposition of total factor productivity (TFP) to date. Starting from the...

A variety of proposals for creating more competition within the railroad sector and in the broader freight transport sector are under consideration in countries throughout the world. Brazil, though something of a latecomer to wider infrastructure reform, has recently taken large steps in...

Not all industries in post-socialist countries are appropriate targets for demonopolization and deregulation: as in the West, some "natural monopoly" sectors will require continued regulation to protect consumers from monopoly abuses. This paper focuses on three aspects of the design of...

One important determinant of the speed and success of transition will be the efficiency of transformation and development of the infrastructure sectors. A great deal of attention has been paid to issues such as privatisation, restructuring, user prices, and terms of access in these sectors,...

One of the key determinants of China's ability to continue its economic growth into the 21stcentury and to distribute the benefits of that growth to a broad spectrum of the population will be the further development of its railroad system. This paper examines the possibilities for improving the...

As road pricing, telematics and logistics evolve, information and communication technologies (ICT) aim directly at making traffic flow more efficiently in a given infrastructure. Furthermore, the virtual world gives rise to new business fields and decentralised structures which affect the...

In its first steps toward reform of its huge and hugely important railway system, the Russian Federation has begun corporate restructuring of a kind favored by many students of railway reform throughout the world: some kind of separation of the entity controlling the infrastructure from the...

The Polish government is considering methods of the privatizing and possible restructuring of the Polish National Railway, PKP, that would improve the efficiency of the railroad while creating some form of competition in order to prevent monopoly pricing. Traditional intramodal competition is...

This paper examines the economic rationale of the ideas of Gladstone & Chadwick on railway regulation and the legacy of their ideas. In 1844 Gladstone proposed and implemented what we would now call price and quantity regulation whereas in 1859 Chadwick proposed competition "for the field", i.e....

The setting of user prices for enterprises with large fixed costs and marginal costs below average costs – “natural monopolies” – raises important policy questions regarding both efficiency and equity. It has become well accepted among economists that, in a variety of settings, welfare...