Effects of the EU Rail Liberalisation on International Rail Passenger Transport

This paper examines the development of the European Union 27 (EU27) cross-border rail passenger market prior to its liberalization in January 2010. The paper assesses the possible future response in supply and demand under market liberalization. The main contribution of this paper is two-fold: first, in order to overcome the serious lack of information relating to international services in Europe, various data sources were combined to provide the basis for quantitative analysis. Second, the analysis was carried out to allow policy makers to draw conclusions on the effectiveness of the European Commission (EC) rail market liberalization directives.