INSIGHTS ON GOVERNMENT REGULATION OF TRANSPORT INFRASTRUCTURE TO ENSURE ITS EFFICIENCY

Abstract

The article seeks to explore the state of government regulation of transport infrastructure and to reveal its specifics in ensuring this sector efficiency in the context of economic globalization. The study suggests that the framework of legislative and strategic documents in the area of transport industry and its infrastructure development regulation should be considered at the international, national and the regional levels. The paper also provides insights to the key challenges hindering the innovative development of the transport infrastructure in Ukraine. The research findings have revealed the major gaps in the system of government regulation of the Ukrainian transport infrastructure which refer to: the absence of a single public regulatory authority in the transport sector which is empowered to perform regulatory, monitoring and the control functions; fundamental imbalances in transport infrastructure development (as to different transport categories); the lack of tax incentives for investors in infrastructure facilities; the lack of a balancing mechanism to regulate the number of operators in various transport market sectors through licensing procedures; the absence of an effective mechanism for designing appropriate pricing (tariff) policies in the transport sector focusing on the need to prevent monopolization while promoting competition in adjacent markets etc. It is argued that a strategy to eliminate the above shortcomings in government regulation practices in the area of transport infrastructure should be built through searching a balance between deregulation (decentralization) and excessive centralization in the specified sector. With the purpose of consolidating and structuring the information to ensure the efficiency of transport infrastructure development based on government intervention, the study has identified the following components of a basic government regulation toolkit which involves a wide range of organizational, regulatory, social, economic, innovative, market-based, informational and analytical instruments.