China's Railway Industry Regulation Theory

The railway industry in China has over time practiced a government-enterprise integrated management system, which is a strictly implicit regulation pattern. Evidence suggests that such implicit regulation pattern in railway industry has no longer been adapted to the development requirements for market economy. The fundamental solution to this problem is to propel the regulation reform in the railway industry in China. Centering on this subject, the dissertation adopting mathematical analysis and comparative research methods, makes exploration into and does research in this field from the angle of industrial economics.The dissertation consists of six chapters: Chapter one is the introduction, which gives a brief introduction of the main contents, the basic methods and the logical systems between chapters and segments; Chapter two, from the angles of economies of scale and economies of scope, depicts the natural monopoly characteristics of the railway industry and explains the limitations of modern natural monopoly industry;from the angles of "three in one"--economies of scale, economies of scope andeconomies of network, it also discusses the interrelationship between these concepts and natural monopoly. In addition, the dissertation taking the railway industry as an example analyses that the infrastructure management and transport operation in the railway industry have more obvious characteristics of economies of scale, economies of scope and economies of network, thus having more marked characteristics of natural monopoly; Chapter three is about the core issues of the railway industry regulation, which makes a discussion of the elementary meanings and motivations of regulation, and also taking the United states as an example, makes an analysis of the startups of railway industry regulation. Moreover, the dissertation makes a deep exploration into the main regulation models and the regulation failures resulting from them, and the nucleus problems of incentive regulation reforms; Chapter four is about the particularities of the railway industryregulation in China. Compared with the western countries, the railway industry regulation in China has more striking particularities. Analyses of these particularities form the empirical bases for the regulation innovations of the railway industry in China; Chapter five is about the new designs of the railway industry regulation in China. It demonstrates and derives the basic objectives of the regulation innovations of the railway industry in China, and analyses the fundamental framework of regulation reforms and the key issues involved; Chapter six is about the relevant conclusions and the pending problems.The main contributions of this dissertation are listed as the followings:l) deducing and proving the "three in one" theory of natural monopoly, that is, from the angles of economies of scale, economies of scope and economies of network, giving an explanation of natural monopoly; 2) putting forward the concept of "strict superadditivity" and proving that total value function and total revenue function of network economy have strict superadditivity; 3) summarizing the emerging characteristics in the market definition of natural monopoly, that is, in the monopoly industry, "market" tends to be more and more smaller than "industry"; 4) expounding that the objective patterns of regulatory reforms of the railway industry in China are explicit regulation with partly characteristics of implicit regulation; 5) proving the idea that the structural reforms of the railway industry in China should be hierarchical; 6)demonstrating the theoretical bases for whether infrastructure management should be separated from transport operation; 7) expounding and proving that the interior of the railway industry in China should implement the differential property rights reform pattern.