The relevance of scale and scope economies in the provision of urban and intercity bus transport.

The relevance of scope economies is central in the unbundling of competitive tendering introduced for the assignment of franchised monopolies in LPT services, concerning either urban or intercity local transport. We present a number of different cost specifications. The separable quadratic and the composite models allow zero outputs to be directly handled and the data to be better fitted. Moderate global scope economies are found (around 2 per cent). By splitting global scope economies into its two components (fixed cost and cost complementarities savings), we find that fixed cost savings can be obtained from joint production. Density economies and scale economies are also detected.