Study On Government Regulation Of Highway Industry’s Toll Price And Toll Period

Highway industry has many technical and economic characteristics,such as natural monopoly, network, public welfare and fundamentality. It is a natural monopoly network-based infrastructure industry. According to economic theory, the government should regulate the highway industry for ensuring to keep economic efficiency and social welfare from damage. With the development of highway industry, many problems and contradictions have appeared, such as the high charging price of highway, unreasonable chargeable period, etc. The mainly reason is that our government regulation mechanism can’t meet the needs of the development of highway industry. So it’s of great importance for our country to research and formulate regulatory measures to meet the demands of highway industry as soon as possible.The current situation of our country’s highway industry government regulation was studied. Then existing problems were analyzed and summarized. Toll price regulation and toll period regulation are the main forms of government regulation on highway industry, and they largely affect the effectiveness of government regulation. Moreover, highway tolls cover many aspects and have strong social influence. So in this paper the opinion that the government should strengthen the highway industry toll price regulation and toll period regulation was proposed, which was also the major contents of this paper.On the basis of international experience and under the guidance of government regulation theory, toll price regulation and toll period regulation of highway industry were studied respectively. Using comparative analysis and combing the actual situation of China’s highway industry, views were concluded as follows: the price-cap regulation should be the best way which is fit for our country’s current situation, and variable toll period regulation is more suitable for the highway industry. Combined with highway industry’s own characteristics, the price-cap regulation model and the variable toll period regulation model on basis of LPVNR model were constructed. Then empirical analyses of these two models were made.The intrinsic link between price-cap regulation and variable toll period regulation was analyzed. The two regulation methods share a common regulatory interaction and both have the function of dealing with traffic risks. They link a lot on the application and interact with each other. Ultimately, following policy suggestions especially for toll price regulation and toll period regulation in highway industry were put forward: improving relevant laws and regulations; strengthening the construction of government regulatory agencies; taking macro-social benefit and micro-economic benefit into account when toll price regulation and toll period regulation are implemented; exerting the incentive functions of toll price regulation and toll period regulation; paying attention to traffic volumes during toll price regulation and toll period regulation; following the market rules during toll price regulation.