D3 (NRP 41) - Fair and Efficient Pricing
Overview
Background & policy context:
The NRP 41 was launched by the Federal Council at the end of 1995 to improve the scientific basis on which Switzerland's traffic problems might be solved, taking into account the growing interconnection with Europe, ecological limits, and economic and social needs.
The NRP 41 aimed to become a think-tank for sustainable transport policy. Each one of the 54 projects belongs to one of the following six modules:
- A Mobility: Socio-institutional Aspects
- B Mobility: Socio-economical Aspects
- C Environment: Tools and Models for Impact Assessments
- D Political and Economic Strategies and Prerequisites
- E Traffic Management: Potentials and Impacts
- F Technologies: Potentials and Impacts
- M Materials
- S Synthesis Projects
Objectives:
According to economic theory, appropriate pricing enables the optimal allocation of scarce resources.
With their approval of distance and weight dependent HGV-tax at the end of September 1998, the Swiss people adopted an important measure for road transport pricing policy.
This has an impact at three levels:
- Firstly it embodies the causality principle and internalises the costs of accidents and environmental pollution, thus tending to reduce them.
- Secondly it helps to finance ongoing infrastructure construction in Switzerland, above all for the new rail transit lines.
- Thirdly it exploits the productivity effect of replacing the 28 tonne limit, and is thus the most important measure supporting bilateral negotiations between Switzerland and the EU.
For the first time, this measure pays for so-called external costs previously covered by public funding. Likewise at EU level, pricing policy in the transport sector is playing an increasingly important role. The EU 'Green Paper' on fair and efficient prices (EU 1995) propagates the pan-European internalisation of external costs. The current White Paper 'Fair Payment of Infrastructure Use' (EU 1998) proposes a pricing system aligned toward social marginal cost pricing: transport infrastructure users should cover the infrastructure costs they actually cause.
The EU considers above all that this will encourage more efficient use of (scarce) infrastructure resources, thus helping to relieve traffic congestion.
The present study investigates how transport infrastructure pricing policy in Switzerland can be improved for greater transparency and coherence, mainly with a view to road and rail transportation. New proposals are worked out based both on theoretical analysis and on current EU policy.
In order to identify an optimal pricing scenario for Switzerland, existing transport infrastructure costs are first evaluated and pricing rules derived as a theoretical and empirical basis for pricing policy improvements in this sector.
As a second step, three scenarios are evaluated in detail for putting these pricing structures into practice.
Methodology:
See objectives
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