Analysis On Input-output Efficiency Of U.S. Freight Railroads

Since the birth of the first railway, American railway industry has profound itsirreplaceable historical significance on social development. Phoenix Nirvana, a new lease oflife. In more than one hundred years, even it has experienced all sorts of ups and downs, theU.S. railway is still known as the most effective and safest system in the world. Itsdevelopment history and the reasons are worthy of study. The paper is based on this issue toextend, takes economic factors into account, and put forward three questions: what makes thisindustry keep high-speed and sustainable growth? Does technology and scale can makemanagement cost decline and operating efficiency improve? What’s the priority of investment?In order to explain these questions, the paper refers to domestic and overseas References, bymeans of the analytical data from2003to2012and based on proposed hypotheses to doempirically test, eventually drew the following conclusions:With regard to the first question, we found that there is a significant positive correlationbetween a part of the elements and the investment level. American railroads have reached thehigh level in terms of cost control and business development, they do prompt theimprovement of the whole income level.As the answer of question2, in the aspect of investment efficiency, there is a significantpositive correlation between the operation scale and infrastructure investment, that is to say,the railway infrastructure construction and renovation is benefit for the railroads maintain andexpand operations and generate the corresponding benefits.On the last question, optimize the allocation of resources, especially mobile device,which contributes to the quality of technical efficiency. According to the standard of freightoperation efficiency, economic benefit and social benefit, it not only complies with theimplementation of enterprise economic efficiency, but also satisfies the social demand forpublic service.Based on the above conclusions, this paper attempts to offer some proposals about thestandardization of the domestic railway freight market and enterprise investment decision, andhopes it will contribute to the healthy and orderly development of capital market and somebusinesses. It tries to investigate some aspects of operations and infrastructure in thedeveloped countries which represented by America to provide some references and lessons toour country, especially for the freight railroads.