‘A highly successful model’? The rail franchising business in Britain
采用社会成本收益分析框架，考察英国铁路私有化对消费者、生产者和政府的影响，发现特许经营仅通过会计手段显得盈利，实际依赖大量政府补贴。
A crucial feature of rail privatisation in Britain was franchising. Passenger services were franchised in competitive bidding processes to train operators which were meant to function with declining subsidy. The article adopts the framework of social cost-benefit analysis to examine rail privatisation’s impact on three key groups; consumers, producers and the government. It establishes that privatisation did not achieve all the supposed benefits. Further, franchising only appears to be profitable through the use of calculative accounting practices, whereby franchised train operators are portrayed as discrete business entities, whereas they are supported by very substantial, ongoing direct and indirect government subsidies.