Europos Sąjungos transporto kainodaros politikos taikymas Lietuvoje

Abstract

The future Lithuanian transport policy is confronted with a dual objective of securing cost recovery on the one hand and aiming at economic efficiency at the other hand. These two objectives are not necessarily coinciding.This dilema confronts every transport pricing policy and has been dealt with in a EU context. Lithuania is “reaching forward to the free market economy” and the Government committed itself to integrate Lithuania into the EU market. Economic, institutional and legal reforms are under implementation with the goal of harmonising and approximating regulations to those of the EU. At the same time the development of Lithuanian transport system is aiming at a better use of the favourable geographic position for international tranportation in the Northeast European region. The key to long term survival of large part of the transport sector in a market economy is viewed to be a sucess of Lithuanian policies in developing transit traffic. This article provides information and tools which can contribute to creating an efficient transport system ensuring economic cost recovery as well as appropriate pricing signals.The pricing signals should reflect the true economic costs in order to develop an efficient transport system and reflect the objectives and regulations of the EU Common Transport Policy. The article comprises on the one hand an overview of the general principles and considerations of EU trans-port pricing policy based primarily on the EU Commission’s Green Paper: “Fair and efficient pricing in transport” and on the other hand it presents a status on the implementation of pricing principles in actual EU legislation.The pricing policy and charges are considered with the view of the potential of cost recovery and the level, structure and incidence of charges with the view of economic efficiency. The most important external costs in Lithuania are: • Transport expenditure; • Infrastructure costs; • Accident costs; • Enviromental costs; • Congestion costs. The marginal costs pricing principle sould be applied in Lithuania in order to obtain the most effective reduction of external costs to the socially acceptable level. In order to do so a tax corresonding to external costs incurred by the specific transport user should ideally be imposed on that user. Therefore in order to impose taxes and charges in accordance with this principle it is necessary to estimate the external costs. The Green paper contains total and uniform estimates on the external costs of accidents, noise, air pollution and a total estimate of congestion costs. On the basis of comparison of external cost estimates for road transport and taxes paid by road transport users, it is concluded that external costs are significantly higher than the difference between taxes and infrastructure costs.Infrastructure costs are estimated in total to provide road infrastructure cost recovery,whereas external costs are not covered.