Airport Privatisation Challenges Way Forward --论文代写范文

51Due论文代写平台essay代写范文:“Airport Privatisation Challenges Way Forward”，这篇论文主要描述的是机场作为飞机升降的场所，为飞机提供着维修和供给的服务保障，也是国际上各大航空公司重要的合作伙伴，所以有人说，如果没有了机场，那么各大航空公司的飞机就无法正常的升降，也就意味了航空公司无法开展业务，因此对于机场的私有化成为了人们议论和探讨的话题，如果通过机场私有化来保证经济长远的发展，这就是本文研究的中心观点。

Airports are key partners for IATA and its Member airlines. Without airports, airlines have no business. Without airlines, the airports have no business. For IATA, whether an airport is in public or private ownership is not the central question. The key factor is that an airport can deliver the cost and service levels that airlines require, regardless of the airport's ownership structure. Therefore, where a decision is taken to privatise an airport, the framework put in place must benefit both the industry and its customers. Privatising airports should not be viewed simply as a short-term revenue raising option for governments. It must be seen as part of a long-term vision for economic development.

Investment in new airport capacity - along with more efficient usage of existing capacity - is essential if the air transport industry is to meet future growth in demand in a sustainable way. A transparent partnership between airlines and private sector or public sector airports is important if we are to meet this challenge successfully.

Privatisation, as a policy, began in 1982 with the sale to individual investors of 51% of British Telecom, which launched a radical change in public policy in Britain and around the world.

BAA, in the UK, was the first major airport privatisation with a full floatation of its shares in 1987.

Airports have until recently been under full Government ownership. This remains the case in the United States where airports are owned by local government and financed mainly through ticket and fuel taxes and bond issues, with airlines owning and operating their own terminals. However, European governments in particular, and increasingly those in Asia-Pacific and Latin America, have privatised many of their larger airports

WHAT EXACTLY DO WE MEAN BY PRIVATISATION?

Since 1982 'privatisation' has become a generic term to describe a range of market-oriented reforms of public sector institutions, including airports and air navigation service providers:

-The full or partial sale to private companies of government assets, usually with the establishment of an autonomous regulator unless competition can be introduced;

-The leasing of assets for long-term operation and development by private companies;

-The liberalisation or the introduction of competition. In practice, this is not possible with airports or air navigation service providers, and

so will not be considered in this paper. Competition for the purchase of the privatized asset or its operation is possible and desirable, but once that has occurred, the provider becomes a private monopoly.

WHAT MAKES IT A SUCCESS?

For privatisation to be in the public interest, rather than just a revenue-raising exercise or a ploy to shift assets off balance sheet for government, it must result in a more efficient management of the infrastructure assets. This is the critical yardstick by which the success or failure of a privatisation must be judged.

Privatisation is not about more efficient finance. The Government is almost always the best borrower, at least in developed economies. Under the public limited company 'plc' model of privatisation the cost of capital may be 6% points higher than what it would cost the government. In order to succeed for customers, private sector management must more than offset this additional cost by efficiency gains. A strong and efficient economic regulator will be a necessary prerequisite for this to be achieved by infrastructure providers, who almost always operate in markets with weak or absent competitive pressures.

But the success of economic regulation is mixed where the interests of managers are not aligned with their customers, which may be the case with, for example, powerful shareholders. Boosting shareholder returns and managers own share options may not always be consistent with providing customers with a cost effective service of the right quality. Managers must also balance the need to provide a cost efficient service for customers, with the (sometimes) conflicting objectives of service quality and safety. Many privatisations in the past 23 years have failed to achieve this.

Overview

Success must be measured not just by the maximisation of revenues from an airport sale, but by whether privatization has delivered a cost-effective service of an appropriate quality for the travelling public. The record with airport privatisations as with other infrastructure industries is often disappointing.

The experience of other infrastructure provider privatisation

There are now over twenty years of experience with the privatisation of infrastructure providers from many industries. Although considerable amounts have been raised from the sale of public assets to the private sector, the benefits to the customer and the public interest in general have been less clear.

There are a number of lessons that can be drawn from this experience.

1.The cost of capital has proved too high under the public limited company 'plc' privatisation model;

2.Efficiency gains have been maximized where the management of business is outsourced;

3.The sale of public assets and the introduction of competition may conflict;

4.Performance improvement can occur without the sale of assets to the private sector;

5.Governance arrangements, not ownership, are the key to success;

6.Under the 'plc' model there is more incentive for the regulated company to present the regulator with inflated investment plans and other strategies to create the scope for unexpectedly large profits or to reduce the pressure for efficiency gains;

7.There has often been a failure to balance objectives to provide a cheap, good quality, safe service;

8.Without legitimacy in the eyes of customers and the public privatisation will not work;

9.The 'plc' model is also inadequate when an infrastructure provider fails;

10.Customers have gained from some privatisations, in terms of lower prices relative to the general consumer price index, but not by a lot;

11.Shareholders of privatised companies do not always win. After an initial rise following favourable conditions under which privatisation took place, share prices have generally underperformed as previously public sector entities have not performed well in the private sector.

Airport Privatisation Options

Option 1: Sale of airports to private companies and investors

So far there have been a relatively small number of airports that have been privatised through the full or partial sale of the assets to private investors. Most of these have taken place in Europe and New Zealand.

Option 2: Trade sales/leasing assets for private operation

In Australia and Latin America (and also Greece) the privatisation option taken by Government owners of airports has not been to sell ownership but to lease the airports for long-term development and/or operation by private companies.

Identified Challenges

-Airports are confronted with serious capacity, financial and environmental constraints, giving rise to potential discrimination between incumbent and new entry airlines. Concentration of operations exacerbates the problem at big hub airports, while there is spare capacity across the airport system, which requires a more commercial and efficient use. Expanding capacity requires financial resources that may well go beyond the capacity or the willingness of public budget to invest. Private capital investment is to be involved, but this implies that the right incentives have to be designed to attract private investors, in particular in the case of big airports.

-Cost and quality of service, which are frequently claimed to be unsatisfactory, are the main concern to airlines. They expect airports to be managed in a commercial way, which is a primary driver for the provision of cost-effective service. Development of capacity in order to expand their activity is also high on the airlines' agenda

VIENNA AIRPORT (VIE), AUSTRIA

-Privatisation of VIE has resulted in inadequate investment and high charges for customers;

-Before privatisation VIE had high costs. Very weak economic regulation has done little to change this providing no incentive to improve efficiency, provide adequate investment, or hold back monopoly profits.

The main problems resulting from the privatisation of VIE have been:

-Direct regulation of charges that creates no incentive for efficiency improvements, unlike the CPI-X approach. Charges had, until recently, been based on a simple formula, rising with forecast inflation with some reduction for higher traffic i.e. in essence a cost-plus approach. Late in 2004 the regime appeared to shift to a more direct regulation of the charge level. Charges were reduced 5% in responses to customer complaints. More fundamentally there has been little incentive for VIE to address the high cost base that causes its charges to be among the highest in the world;

-Classic monopolist behaviour is to restrict output in order to boost profit margins. The inadequate investment programme appears to demonstrate this outcome. There are insufficient incentives for cost-efficient investment;

-There are few checks and balances with the absence of a Competition Commission nor an independent economic regulator with a clear mandate to act in the public interest.

ZURICH AIRPORT (ZRH), SWITZERLAND

-The privatisation of ZRH was setback by the demise of Swissair, its main customer, but has resulted in few efficiency gains and it is one of the most expensive airports in the world

Conclusions

1.Successful airport privatisations engage customers as key stakeholders from the outset in establishing the master plans, financial plans and the economic regulation process and then involve them in an ongoing and regular basis through agreed processes and full transparency;

2.More efficient management is the key to successful privatisation, since cost of capital is almost always higher in the private sector;

3.Good governance is more important than transferring ownership to the private sector, in order for privatisation to be in the public interest. However, privatisation through lease sales will be detrimental to the public interest if royalties to the Government are excessive;

4.Independent, robust, economic regulation will always be necessary to create incentives, for efficiency improvements and for sharing these gains with customers, in the private monopolies created by privatisation. If the Government retains a shareholding and controls the economic regulator, there is automatically an unacceptable conflict of interest

5.The most successful economic regulation has been where the regulator is also overseen by an independent Competition Commission to prevent too comfortable a relationship between the regulator and the regulated entity;

6.Economic regulators have sometimes been good at extracting maximum value from existing assets, but have not been good at ensuring cost-effectiveness from new investment;

7.Mechanisms to incentivize cost efficiency and continuous improvements must be built in from the outset. CPI-X price cap regulation will create the incentives for efficiency improvement, whereas direct or rate-of return regulation risks preserving monopoly profits and inefficiencies in the early stages of a privatised airport;

8.In order to ensure good quality as well as cost-effective service, it is essential to have in place service level agreements (or similar systems) to ensure that service quality standards are maintained and improved;

9.Controls must be put in place to prevent unjustified asset revaluations and moves to dual-till accounting which leave costs common to both aeronautical and commercial services burdening airlines and their passengers with substantial charge increases;

10.A new model, for structuring infrastructure providers in the private sector, is emerging, which could in theory better serve customers; a debt-financed private company structure limited by guarantee, accountable to a board of customers and business partners. In practice this still may not prevent 'gold-plating' on investment programmes. Customer involvement remains essential

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