Research on Investment Risks of the Expressway in China by using of Scale Matching Coefficient

Firstly, in light of the 2nd ranking of China"s expressway traffic mileage and the increasing investment on expressway to cope with the challenge of financial crisis, this paper presented a concept of matching coefficient of network scale of expressway and its computing formula on the basis of network scale computation of the trunk highway model proposed by Japanese professor Fujii, then calculated the matching coefficient of expressway in China, the United States, Janpan, Germany, Britain, France and Italy respectively using the land area, population, GNP, traffic mileage. Secondly, the matching coefficient of expressway network scale in China is also computed by simulating the average annual GNP growth of 8 percent and the population size pf 1.6 billion by 2016. Results indicate that the level of development of China"s highways has reached or even exceeded the overall level of developed countries and the continuance of investment would have a serious system risk, and the system risk mainly have features in the followings: i) The regional economy, resources, government"s macro-control and management mechanism are overloaded by the excessive investment on expressway, which has hindered the stable operation and the normal development of regional economy; ii) excessive investment has resulted in a high risk of environmental protection and resource consumption; iii) Great financial risk has been embedded in the irrational investment and financing structure; iv) Costs are much higher than the growth rate of revenue, forming a higher operational risk; v) The disacord between management system and operational mechanism gives rise to serious management risks.