In the last decade many countries turned to private sources to provide services formerly offered by public agencies. Europeans, particularly the British and the French, were leaders in this movement. Developing countries also experimented extensively with privatization in the 1980s, with varying degrees of success. Because governments around the world are heavily involved in transportation, it is a natural focus of privatization experiments and in many ways has been at the cutting edge. Going Private examines the diverse privatization experiences of transportation services and facilities. Cases are drawn from the United States, Asia, Europe, and Latin America. Since almost every country has experimented to some degree with highway and bus privatization, the authors focus particularly on these services, although they also discuss urban rail transit and airports. Highways and buses, they explain, encompass all three of the most common and basic forms of privatization: the sale of an existing state-owned enterprise; use of private, rather than public, financing and management for new infrastructure development; and contracting out to private vendors public services previously provided by government employees. After thoroughly examining these services and discussing the motives for, and objections to, privatization, the authors look at the prospects for privatization in other sectors and industries. They assess those circumstances in which privatization is most likely to succeed and those in which it is most likely to fail, for political as well as economic reasons. The authors conclude that privatization involves many political and social as well as economic dimensions. Privatization is usually not simply a matter of efficiency improvements or capital augmentation but also involves such deeply imbedded societal concerns as equity, income transfers, environmental problems, and attitudes toward taxation and the role of government.

"Learning to regulate fairly, effectively, and at arm's length may be the main challenge governments face in attracting private investment and financing to the transport sector"--Cover.

The paper intends to provide an insight to the need and the available options for privatisation practices being implemented in the Third World countries. These include Private Sector Financing as Contractor financing, BOOT financing, Subsidised BOOT financing and several others. The privatisation of different sectors in number of developing countries including Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Turkey and Pakistan is under process. These sectors include power, public health, environment, and transport infrastructure. This research emphasises particularly on the degree of risk involved during operation phase of a road infrastructure project. This risk mainly arises from the overestimation of the toll revenues. An effort has been made to identify the sources of traffic overestimation and the degree of project sensitivity associated with it. The paper in its general layout consists of the basics involved in important options for privatisation at first and then examines the effect of reduced revenues on overall profitability of the project from entrepreneur as well as host government's perspective. An effort has been made to develop an empirical relationship among different variables of the phenomena using computer simulation technique. Finally most (from author's point of view) suitable method has been detailed and examined from economical (host government's) prospective. For the covering abstract of this conference see IRRD number 872978.

The 1990s saw an increase in the liberalisation of transport policies and a strengthening of the role of private operators and investors in transport infrastructure worldwide. The search for sustained improvement in efficiency is probably secondary to the need to find additional financing, but it is improvement in services that is at the core of the new role of the government in transport. Governments must now become fair economic regulators of many of the privately operated transport services and infrastructures. This book examines the major challenges that governments are likely to face in taking on their new role in transport.