Economies of Scope in European Railways: An Efficiency Analysis

Christian Growitsch and Heike Wetzel

No 29, Working Paper Series in Economics from University of Lüneburg, Institute of Economics

Abstract: In the course of railway reforms at the end of the last century, European na- tional governments, as well the EU Commission, decided to open markets and to separate railway networks from train operations. Vertically integrated railway com- panies argue that such a separation of infrastructure and operations would diminish the advantages of vertical integration and would therefore not be suitable to raise economic welfare. In this paper, we conduct a pan-European analysis to investi- gate the performance of European railways with a particular focus on economies of scope associated with vertical integration. We test the hypothesis that integrated railways realize economies of joint production and, thus, produce railway services on a higher level of efficiency. To determine whether joint or separate production is more efficient we apply an innovative Data Envelopment Analysis super-efficiency bootstrapping model which relates the efficiency for integrated production to a vir- tual reference set consisting of the separated production technology and which is applicable to other network industries as energy and telecommunication as well. Our findings are that for a majority of European Railway companies economies of scope exist.

Keywords: Efficiency; Vertical Integration; Railway Industry (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L22 L43 L92 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2006-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-eec, nep-eff and nep-net
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

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Working Paper: Economies of Scope in European Railways: An Efficiency Analysis (2006)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:lue:wpaper:29

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