The dissertation attempts to see whether liberalizing Pakistan’s national rail transport system will enable the latter to grow sustainably. First an assessment of existing literature on the subject was conducted. Then Pakistan’s national rail transport system is studied in a multi-facet...

This paper presents a theoretical network programming formulation of the extended gateway concept in port hinterland container logistics. The model represents a novel extension of the inward interport model developed by Iannone and Thore (2010), as it simultaneously incorporates economic,...

The existing studies that investigate the effectiveness of yardstick regulation in the Japanese railway industry have presented conflicting conclusions. These previous studies have either compared results before and after the introduction of the yardstick regulation in 1997 or compared companies...

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 may be...

Title IV of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments introduced a cap-and-trade system for sulfur dioxide emissions from electric power plants in the United States. This paper analyzes the effects of that regulatory change on the prices charged by the two railroads that hauled low-sulfur coal east from...

We describe a pair of subadditivity tests that can be used to evaluate the technological feasibility of separating a vertically integrated network monopoly into a common infrastructure component and competing operating components. We implement the tests with a Generalized McFadden cost function...

The U.S. federal government enacted fuel efficiency standards for medium and heavy trucks for the first time in September 2011. Rationales for using this policy tool typically depend upon frictions existing in the marketplace or consumers being myopic, such that vehicle purchasers undervalue the...

Almost a decade after Argentina began privatizing its railways, resolution of the conflicts between regulators, users and operators continues to take longer, and to be more difficult than expected. This paper shows that many of these conflicts arose because there are no rule of interactions...

In this paper, we study how maritime ferry industries should be regulated. This is a fundamental issue in so far as maritime transport between islands and mainland is a service of general interest. We argue that the policy design crucially depends on the goals the collectivity pursues (pure...

The Russian economy relies on the Russian freight railways to an extraordinary degree. In 2001, after years of debate, the Russian government adopted an ambitious plan to transform this vertically integrated, government owned monopoly into a system that would rely more on private investment and...