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Abstract: Subsidy policies on public urban transport have been adopted ubiquitously. In both developed and developing countries, subsidies are implemented to make transport more affordable. Despite their widespread implementation, there are virtually no quantitative assessments of their distributional incidence, making it impossible to determine if these instruments are pro-poor. This paper reviews the arguments used to justify subsidy policies in public urban transport. Using different tools to quantitatively evaluate the incidence and distributive impacts of subsidy policy options, the paper analyzes the findings of a series of research papers that study urban public transport subsidy policies in developed and developing countries. The available evidence indicates that current public urban transport subsidy policies do not make the poorest better off. Supply-side subsidies are, for the most part, neutral or regressive; while demand-side subsidies perform better-although many of them do not improve income distribution. Considering that the policy objective is to improve the welfare of the poorest, it is imperative to move away from supply-side subsidies towards demand-side subsidies and to integrate transport social concerns into wider poverty alleviation efforts, which include the possibility of channeling subsidies through monetary transfer systems or through other transfer instruments (food subsidies, health services and education for the poor). The general conclusion of the paper is that more effort should be devoted to improve the targeting properties of public urban transport subsidies using means-testing procedures to ensure a more pro-poor incidence of subsidies.
An empirical investigation into the distorting effects of subsidies on firm efficiency, this book puts together and applies recent developments in econometric methods to explore efficiency consequences of government subsidy on firm operations. Within the neoclassical framework, the book provides analytical solutions capturing the effect of subsidy on cost, output, input demand, and allocative distortions when the firm receives operating and capital subsidies. By doing so, the book avoids the ad-hoc models that have been used to estimate the effect of subsidy on firm efficiency in the transit industry. The book takes the analytical model and develops empirical models to estimate the effect of subsidy on firm efficiency in transit firms. It applies a variety of techniques—deterministic, stochastic frontier estimation, and Data Envelopment Analysis to capture various aspects of the effect of subsidy. It separates allocative inefficiency into those due to subsidy and those due to internal factors. The book's contribution is the consistency and thoroughness with which the authors deal with the topic and the rigor of the empirical estimation.
The session contains the following papers: Estimating economic impacts of highway improvements: a Kansas case study (Babcock, MW, Emerson, MJ and Prater, M); California rail passenger ridership and subsidies: a historical perspective (Matthews, JR); Operating subsidies and performance in public transit: an empirical study (Karlaftis, M and McCarthy, P). For the covering abstract of the conference see call number US6 ATR 96P01-15.
The 394 citations in this bibliography deal with some of the most critical problems confronting transit operators and government bodies in a period of rising operating costs and increasing problems in assuring adequate subsidies. Nearly all are from U. S. sources and the majority are from the past ten years. They include technical reports, journal articles and dissertations.