Transport markets in the EU and their regulatory functions
Transport markets, with their inherent mechanism of demand reporting and fulfillment and their typically regulatory nature of economic processes, operate on similar principles to other types of service, commodity, and financial markets. Together with the arrangement of their constituent elements, their structure, and the relationships between them, they act as self-regulating mechanisms for transport systems. Due to their specificity and form of operation, and above all the nature of the regulatory mechanism, they, along with other types of markets, form part of the so-called autonomous subsystem of transport activity regulation – both in the sphere of production and service exchange, and to some extent, the allocation of resources in the transport sector. However, they are not the only regulatory mechanism. Alongside the market-based, autonomous subsystem, there is a central regulation subsystem in transport, whose primary tool and form of regulation is transport policy – both national and international, along with its numerous relationships with other types of EU sectoral and horizontal policies. These two subsystems, with fundamentally different regulatory mechanisms, complement each other in practice, creating a transport sector regulation system typical for each country. The functioning of this system is schematically presented in Figure 1.
The market regulation subsystem, with its mechanism based on the law of supply and demand, is itself subject to regulatory processes in practice. In most countries, especially in the EU, it is subject to central regulation. The regulation of transport markets stems not only from the fact that they are an imperfect regulatory instrument which, under certain conditions (the existence of certain types of markets), does not function efficiently enough and can generate significant economic and social losses within the transport sector and its environment. This is influenced not only by the still-dominant public nature of transport activity, resulting from the necessity of state (public factor) involvement in this sphere of product-service delivery, treated as public goods and produced to a large extent on the basis of technical infrastructure components of the same nature, but also, as a significant consequence of this, the scale of monopolization of these markets and their degree of market maturity. In the EU, this regulation was also caused by the need to build a common market, including a single transport market, which would ensure equal competitive conditions for all participants in service exchange, based on uniform rules for access to the profession of carrier and the market in all member states. As a result, in building a common transport space, the sphere of markets was interfered with in an almost unprecedented way (over-regulation), influencing them through a central, EU-wide regulatory mechanism, which was and is transport policy. In accordance with its assumptions, in order to improve the functioning of such market mechanisms and to level out any distortions of competition that might arise there, a market regulator institution was also introduced, which is an entity independent of its participants and acts to ensure equal access to infrastructure networks for all users.
The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka” 6/2008.