A proposal for a world database on transport infrastructure regulation

The paper presents the structure and the concepts at the basis of a database on world transport infrastructure regulation, to be launched. The database will be built promoting a “soft” survey on the world regulatory practices, to be filled by scholars and experts on a voluntary basis. The goal of the database is to stimulate research on best practices and interaction among regulators, regulated and scholars. The work is still under construction. The database structure is ready and the survey is already launched, but incomplete. This paper is a preliminary document which provides a detailed description of the aims and of the database structure, in order to circulate the project and collect suggestions from the academic community. The structure of the paper is as follows. After a presentation of the aims of the work, section 2 provides a literature review on existing databases. Section 3 details the project, describing the characteristics of the survey, the strengths and weaknesses of the approach, the network to be activated. Section 4 is giving more details on the actual structure of the database and of the corresponding survey. Section 5 gives notice of the first results obtained with a preliminary survey and a preliminary review of literature on some selected countries. Conclusions will outline the next steps of the research.