IASON - Integrated Appraisal of Spatial economic and Network effects of transport investments and policies
Overview
Background & policy context:
A common understanding of rules for the assessment of economic impacts of transport related projects and policies at the EU level is useful in the sense that:
- it helps to make good judgements about alternative transport investment options, both for priority setting and for making good judgements about the rate of return of transport investments;
- it makes trans-border evaluation schemes comparable and can also be used for developing criteria for cross-border investment and compensation schemes;
- it allows to compare policies aimed at stimulating the development in peripheral regions with those alleviating congestion and transit traffic problems in more central located regions of the Community.
The project IASON is designed to take a practical and scientific step into this direction.
Objectives:
The objectives of IASON are as follows:
- To improve existing assessment frameworks by ensuring that direct and indirect impacts are clearly distinguished within the appraisal, and that the incidence of benefits and costs, and sources of additionality and/or double counting are transparent;
- To perform a systematic and quantitative analysis of the network, spatial and socio-economic impacts of transport investments and policy by refining existing EU-level models (a.o. CGEurope, SASI and SCENES) and carrying out scenario simulations;
- To act as discussion platform to
- provide broad guidance for the usage of the assessment framework within projects of the other sub-tasks of this cluster (TRANSECON and TIPMAC),
- allow the validation of this framework and tools developed in these subprojects,
- join assessment experiences from the scientific community and
- stimulate the discussion of other topics of mutual interest, such as methodological development, comparison of results, linking the macro-level analysis to the micro-level, etc. and
- to ensure feedback from the policy-makers as to the relevance and usefulness of the IASON approach;
- Finally, to learn from the experience of applying the framework in practical contexts so as to provide recommendations for project analysis of transport investments and policies and for the development of supporting tools and databases.
Methodology:
In order to improve the understanding of the impact of transportation policies on short- and long-term spatial development in the EU, the project has gathered empirical evidence about the linkage between the transportation system for good and for people on the one hand and the dynamics of firm and households location on the other. It has refined and validated existing modelling for assessing short-term welfare effects as well as long-term locational dynamic implications of transport policy scenarios.
Since the start of IASON, they have developed a new model version in a way that allows for calibration with existing data. In particular the following tasks have been carried out:
- sectoral and regional coverage: defenition of new sectors and regions;
- model structure: setting up the system of equations describing the multi-sectoral system of the new model;
- travel demand: developing a new approach to model passenger travel behaviour in a microeconomically consistent framework that can consistently be integrated into the equilibrium context;
- calibration: developing a calibration procedure working with a limited database without a full multiregional social accounting matrix.
With the new model, different scenarios were used. The scenarios were based on pricing and infrastructure policy measures:
- implementation of Social Marginal Cost Pricing
- implementation of the Trans European Network.
Then a discussion platform was installed to enable interaction between all the subtasks within the cluster. It looked at the building of the overall frameworks at the first stage of the project. It improved the consistency of the approaches and results. Finally, it has brought together experiences from the supplying (scientific) community as well as the decision-making community for establishing guidelines for the transport project assessment at EU level.
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