The paper challenges the existing sustainable transport literature. Most sustainable transport plans focus on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in either one region or country and this neglects two handicaps of strong unilateral action. The first is that climate is a global commons...

It has become increasingly common to allocate highway franchises to the bidder that offers to charge the lowest toll. Often, building a highway increases the value of land held by a small group of developers, an effect that is more pronounced with lower tolls. We study the welfare implications...

Measuring the productivity of highway concessionaires is very relevant, especially when a price cap regulation is applied where tariff increases are based on expected improvements of productivity. Output may be measured in terms of traffic or network length, or a combination of both, while...

Over the past twenty years, the growth in the use of ppps for news infrastructures did not knock down the bases of public economics. This article examines, however, in which measure it is advisable to modify the use of the cost-benefit analysis by the public authorities in the case of ppps, in...

To make Asia more economically sustainable and resilient against external shocks, regional economies need to be rebalanced toward regional demand- and trade-driven growth through increased regional connectivity. The effectiveness of connectivity depends on the quality of hard and soft...

Contract theory claims that renegotiation prevents attainment of the efficient solution that could be obtained under full commitment. Assessing the cost of renegotiation remains an open issue from an empirical viewpoint. We fit a structural principal-agent model with renegotiation on a set of...

We explore how benefit-cost efficiency and electoral support affect road investment decisions in Sweden and Norway. In Norway, neither benefits nor costs seem to affect project selection. In Sweden, civil servants’ decisions are strongly affected by projects’ benefit-cost ratios, with a...

The May 2009 Rose Garden ceremony for President Obama’s signing of new fuel efficiency mandates for automobiles was attended by a remarkable gathering of “bootleggers and Baptists” - “Baptist” environmentalists who were pleased to get a policy they desired, and “bootlegger”...

Streetcars are the latest urban planning fad, stimulated partly by the Obama administration’s preference for funding transportation projects that promote “livability” (meaning living without automobiles) rather than mobility or cost-effective transportation. Toward that end, the...

Nigeria has been noted to hold the largest proven natural gas reserves in Africa as well as being one of the top ten LNG exporting countries globally for several years. It is however paradoxical that natural gas currently accounts for only about 6% of the nation’s total primary energy supply....