Railway Reform in South East Europe and Turkey : On the Right Track?

The railways of South East Europe and
Turkey experienced significant declines in traffic volumes
in 2009. This reflected the impact of the international
financial crisis unleashed in the last quarter of 2008 and
its contractionary impact on the economies of the region and
elsewhere. Lower traffic volumes translated in most cases
into a serious deterioration of the financial performance of
the state-owned railways. This brought home the costs of
failing to implement essential reforms to improve the
operational and financial performance of the sector when the
economy was strong. In Romania in 2010, large-scale layoffs
were announced at short notice for the state rail companies.
The situation is similar for the Bulgarian state rail
incumbents; they face an acute liquidity crisis, and will
require additional state aid merely to keep running. The
lesson of these events is clear: it is unwise to delay
implementing state railway sector reforms during good
economic times, because the consequences can be too severe
if a financial downturn occurs before those reforms have
been taken and properly implemented. This report begins by
assessing implementation of the European Union (EU) legal
and institutional framework and the state of institutional
reform in South East Europe and Turkey. It then turns to a
comparative assessment of the operational and financial
performance of the rail sector in each of the 10 countries
over 2005-2009, comparing the report countries with the
EU-27 benchmark and three EU countries, Germany, Poland, and
Slovenia. The report then moves on to the issue of rail
corridor performance, with a specific focus on improving the
institutional and regulatory environment at border-crossing
points, before offering some conclusions. The first annex
focuses on the performance of the incumbent state-owned
railways of South East Europe and Turkey in much greater detail.