In 1998 the European Commission established important principles for the pricing of transport in its White Paper ’Fair Payment for Infrastructure Use’. The Commission said that, in principle, users of all transport modes should be charged for the marginal external and infrastructure costs they cause. This principle was reinforced in the 2001 White Paper ’European transport policy for 2010: time to decide’. Since 1998 numerous studies have been published translating the principle of ’marginal social cost’ (MSC) pricing or ’efficient’ pricing into concrete figures for different types of vehicles. At first sight, these studies appear to differ significantly in both approach and final figures; there is, moreover, a lack of transparency as to the causes of these differences. This is hampering the development of policy at the European level and in the Member States: if economists cannot agree on figures and methodology, how can politicians ever use the data they come up with as a solid basis for their ideas on pricing policies? Against this background the Dutch Ministry of Transport commissioned CE to undertake an analysis of five important European studies presenting figures on ’optimal’ prices for different modes of transport. These five studies were: • ECMT, Efficient transport for Europe : policies for internalisation of external costs, Paris, 1998; • CE Delft, Efficient prices for transport : estimating the social costs of vehicle use, Delft, 1999; • INFRAS/IWW, Efficient costs of transport : accident, evironmental and congestion costs of transport in Western Europe, Zürich/Karlsruhe, 2000; • TRENEN, several publications on the input for the TRENEN model; • UNITE, UNIfication of accounts and marginal costs for Transport Efficiency, several deliverables 2000-2003. The main purposes of the present study are: • to identify the most important differences between the studies; • to formulate a discussion agenda for narrowing these differences. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting