MEASURING THE BENEFITS FROM ROAD HAULAGE DEREGULATION - EXAMPLE OF SOME FRENCH RESULTS

After years of price control and entry restrictions (a policy mostly aimed at protecting the national railways company), trucking was almost totally deregulated in France a decade ago. Since then, the trucking industry has undergone dramatic changes, not all of them attributable to deregulation. As a result of these changes, the price of freight transport fell, even in nominal terms, despite an increase in the price of most of its inputs, indicating a surge in efficiency. Freight transport in France was deregulated in two major steps, in 1979 for short distance, in 1986 for long distance. The paper studies the case of long distance haulage. After discussing methodological issues, it gives a measure of the effects of deregulation on prices, and discusses the other impacts on general freight traffic, on rail transport, on safety, on labor conditions, etc. Its impact on prices is tremendous. Without deregulation, prices of long distance haulage would probably be more than half higher. Evidence shows that this gain was not obtained at the expense of safety and suggests it did not have adverse effects on labor conditions.