Comparison Of Rail Industry Regulatory Reforms And Performance Between China And Russia

All countries take the natural monopoly industries as the key regulatory reform in recent decades, especially electricity, water, telecommunications, gas, etc, are coming towards to market competition mechanism through reform gradually, broking the monopoly status. However, as the final piece of the "tough bones" in natural monopoly industry, railway property generally belongs to the state in the primary stage of economic development. While administration, supervision and all operating system, service and other functions are distributed to separate department, which will implement and guide daily production and operating activities. As from economics views, under a certain degree, monopoly will cause inefficient allocation of resources, insufficient competition and ability hysteresis of innovation. As a result many countries in the world have conducted railway reform, perhaps they took different reforms or methods, or different emphasis point, but they really made great achievements in the reform of railway industry. The reason why this paper takes China and Russia two countries to research national railway sector reforms is because the big background of planning economic system that they both exist. No matter from railway operation system and management mode, or operational kilometers, the two countries are of great comparability. Secondly, China began to conduct railway reform from the end of the 1990s, established several freight company which have their own operation scope on the basis of experience of many countries in reference. However, network separation and property right reform which have always been advocated, is just a surface "glitzy ambition", not really touches the core foundation of the railroad industry management and operation system, and there is no change of centralized monopoly structure. While Russia began to determine tone of reform to railroad industry from the year 2002, Russian government has taken the management and operation system reform of passenger separation and railway network separation step by step, since the railway joint-stock company founded from 2003 until today. However, "gradual" reform of China railway industry and "radical" reform of Russia railway mode which could achieve further and better optimization the allocation of resource, is the key point the author will study.For the research methods, this paper mainly adopted history dynamic comparative method on the theoretical references. According to reform stage of mutual control constraint mechanism, investment mechanism and several aspects as contrast description. On the other hand this paper takes performance measurement methods which are used in transportation economics, making comparisons between the two countries of railway freight turnover respectively as national GDP contribution after the reform. Although finally China railway industry "progressive" reform efforts is obvious and is more achievable, in the long run China still have to enter the track "network separation, government and enterprise separation ", for the reason that long-term monopoly could cause the waste of financial resources, which will lead to corruption. And Russia also needs to improve its railway sector reform mode further, for "one size fits all" approach can cause lack of investment, lack of efficiency in management order, and eventually dragged the pace slow of railway industry reform.