Road Infrastructure Concession Practice in Europe

Bousquet, Franck ; Fayard, Alain

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: BRIDGE;    BRIDGES;    CARRIERS;    CARS;    CONCESSION;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-2675
RP-ID  :  WPS2675

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

In a road infrastructure concession, apublic authority grants specific rights to a private, orsemi-public company to construct, overhaul, maintain, andoperate infrastructure for a given period. By contract, thepublic authority charges that company with making theinvestments needed to create the service at its own cost,and to operate it at its own risk. The price paid to thecompany comes from the service's users, the publicauthority, or both. In 1999, out of roughly 51,000kilometers of European motorways, about 17,000 kilometers(33 percent) were concessioned - 16,400 kilometers by toll,and 670 kilometers by shadow toll (design, build, finance,and operate arrangements). Of these, 73 percent are managedby the public sector, and 27 percent by private companies.State-owned companies have been important in Europeanmotorway concessions. Systems vary among countries, forexample, in how they share risks between the concessionauthority, and the concession company. As the motorwaynetwork has grown denser, attributing commercial risk hasbecome more difficult. Increasingly, public authorities mustplay a greater regulatory role. Already, bad experienceshave made the private sector reluctant to bear thecommercial risk. Ant the commercial risk is sometimes toogreat to be carried by the concession company alone.Commercial risk should be controlled by mechanismsincorporated in the contract, but control of the commercialrisk must not eliminate incentives. In addition tosafeguarding the community's interests, the publicconcession authority, must increase citizen awareness aboutconcession decisions, to ensure their social acceptability.Formulas for determining toll charges, differ throughEurope. So do criteria for selecting concession companies.In 1999, the main criteria used were these: 1) the amount ofpublic subsidy required; 2) the credibility of the financialarrangements; 3) the project's technical quality; 4)the operating strategy, and price policy; and, 5) thereputation of the concession company (whether it has aconstruction company among its shareholders, for example).The increasingly frequent use of private funding, must betaken into account when defining the training required bypersonnel responsible for monitoring the concessions.