Research On Incentive Price Regulation Of Toll Road Industry

The toll road industry has technical and economic characteristics such as natural monopoly,externality,basic and public welfare,quasi-public goods attributes,which determines the necessity of regulating it.Price regulation is the core content of government regulation.It is of great significance for the toll road industry to improve economic performance and achieve sustainable development.However,the pricing of toll roads in China’s toll road industry is based on the costs reported by tolling operating units and will be implemented after review and approval by relevant departments.Due to the problem of information asymmetry between the tolling operating unit and the government,the operating unit is liable to misreport costs,which leads to the unreasonable establishment of tolls.It is impossible to motivate operating units to reduce costs and improve performance.Therefore,it is necessary to design a scientific and reasonable price regulation model to promote the economic performance of various operating units.First,starting from the technical and economic characteristics of China’s toll road industry,the reason of price regulation is analyzed;Based on this,the advantages and disadvantages of traditional price regulation methods and incentive price regulation methods represented by ceiling price regulation and rule competition regulation are analyzed.It is concluded that compared with traditional price regulation methods,incentive price regulation methods can promote toll road operating units to reduce costs and improve economic performance.However,the ceiling price regulation has the problems of “ratchet effect” and“factor X” that are difficult to determine.Ruler competition regulation Companies that need to compare with each other have similar external environments.Therefore,we need to combine the advantages and disadvantages of each method to build an incentive price regulation model suitable for China’s toll road industry.Secondly,on the basis of sorting out the status quo of price regulation in the toll road industry in China,it is found that the toll road industry lacks an incentive price regulation method,the regulatory authority has unclear responsibilities,pricing lacks a competitive mechanism,lacks incentives to improve service quality,and lacks scientific and reasonable costs.Supervision and examination system and other issues,and evaluated its effectivenessfrom three aspects: operating efficiency,cost compensation,and social equity.Thirdly,in combination with the reality of China’s toll road industry,and using incentive regulation theories and methods,a corresponding two-stage incentive price regulation model has been constructed.The applicable conditions of the model are proposed.Based on this,the sample companies are selected to verify the operability and rationality of the model.Finally,based on the above research,we need to improve the entry and exit mechanism of the toll road industry,establish independent government regulatory agencies,improve relevant laws on price regulation,build a sound relative performance evaluation system,and strengthen the analysis of traffic volume and service quality indicators.Five aspects of attention have been put forward to reform the incentive pricing regulation of the toll road industry.