Competition in intercity bus tendering in Spain

Transcription

1 Competition in intercity bus tendering in Spain Javier Asensio 1, Anna Matas Department of Applied Economics Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona 2 August 2017 Preliminary and incomplete. Please do not cite. Abstract The system of competition for the market for intercity bus services in Spain under the regulatory responsibility of the Ministry of Transport has undergone different changes since 2007, with four different versions of the terms and conditions of the tendering bids. Using a purpose-built database that considers all the tendered concessions of the last 10 years, this paper empirically identifies the impact that the changes may have had on the number of bidders and the winning prices. We observe that although the more recent versions of the tendering terms have had a positive impact on the number of firms submitting bids, the effect on the final price paid by the users is limited due to the increases in the maximum price defined in the more recent tenders. 1 Author for correspondence: javier.asensio@uab.es

2 1. Introduction The markets of intercity bus services have not received much attention by economic researchers. The fact that apparently these services have not experienced significant technological changes, their demand is stagnant or decreasing and they nor are they at the centre of the current debate on policy reform in most countries may explain the lack of interest on them 2. However, the previous statement does not imply that no lessons can be learned from its analysis. The variety of regulatory settings applied to bus and coach services in different countries, ranging from monopolistic public provision to outright liberalisation provides an interesting framework in which such regimes can be compared (see van de Velde 2009). Although the sector has traditionally been heavily regulated, with restricted entry and lack of competition in most cases, some countries have tried to liberalise it following the UK experience of the 1980s. An alternative to a liberalised regime with free entry is that of countries like Spain, where monopolistic concessions are awarded for a route or group of routes. In this case, the way to introduce competitive pressure on the operators has to be by means of competition for the market mechanisms. In these cases, the details of the tendering process are of utmost importance, since small differences in the institutional design can have large impacts in terms of how much effective competition develops in those markets. Therefore, assessing the impact of changes in the tendering regulations can be of interest to identify who competition for the market can, or cannot, be developed. The aim of this paper is to describe the recent evolution of the market for tendered intercity bus services in Spain and to assess the impact of reforms that have affected the details of its tendering procedures. Without significantly modifying the general legal mechanisms, in recent years a number of changes have taken place in the terms and conditions of the tendering bidding forms that affect the importance given to 2 Some recent exceptions include Ida and Talit (2015), who describe the operation of the tendering process in Israel, and Beck and Walter (2013), who analyse regional differences in the tendering of bus services in Germany. Van de Velde (2014) discusses recent policy changes in urban and intercity services and Blayac and Bougette (2017) provide an analysis of certain routes in the new French liberalised context. 1

3 different parameters. The availability of detailed information of those changes and on the outcomes of tendering processes carried out under each one of them makes it possible to empirically measure the impact of those changes. The paper is structured as follows: section 2 briefly describes the economic characteristics of the sector and section 3 focuses on the changes in the bidding forms that have taken place in recent years. Section 4 shows the empirical results of the impact that changes on the bidding process have had on the number of firms that submit bids and on prices. Section 5 concludes. 2. Intercity bus services in Spain Intercity buses carried 52% of interurban passengers in Spain in 2014, for a total of 651 million passengers. This large market share (without taking into account distance travelled) compared with the European average can be due to the fact that in Spain buses had not been excluded from the main transport corridors, which in other countries were reserved for railways (Van de Velde, 2009). Comparing railway and bus demand for long (more than 300 kms) and mid-distance trips (between 50 and 300 kms), the bus has a clear advantage over rail in the shorter segment (Graph 1). In the case of long distance trips railways increase their lead after 2012, coinciding with a change in Renfe s pricing policy that makes the use of the already large high speed network much more affordable. Graph 1. Intercity passengers by bus and rail a. Middle distance passengers (thousands) b. Long distance passengers (thousands) 240,000 30, ,000 Bus 25,000 Rail 160,000 20, ,000 15,000 Bus 80,000 10,000 40,000 Rail 5, Source: Encuesta de Viajeros, INE 2

4 All regular bus services in Spain are operated as concessions. Organising and awarding the tendering procedure is the responsibility of the Ministry of Transport Ministry (Ministerio de Fomento) when they cover routes in more than one region. In the case of regional services, regulation responsibilities fall within the government of the corresponding regional government (Comunidad Autónoma), of which there are 17 in Spain. In parallel to Spain s process of political decentralisation, the authority over routes that operate within a region s border has been transferred to the regional governments. This has usually been done via a process of breaking up the concessions into its regional routes, which were transferred to the regional authorities, while the central government kept the responsibility over remaining inter-regional routes. Since 1990, 77 concessions have been reformed and transferred in this way. 3. Evolution of the tendering regime The Spanish surface transport law (LOTT) considers intercity bus services as public services which have to be provided by means of a concession, whose contract sets the exact itinerary, number and location of stops, maximum prices and frequencies, as well as guaranteeing exclusivity rights to the service provider for the length of the concession. The LOTT was passed in Existing concessions at that time were automatically extended for 20 years without any tendering process. Due to mergers or compensations related with price adjustments, some concessions were subsequently extended for some years. As a result, not all pre-lott concessions ended in Most of them did so between 2007 and 2013, but some had their length extended until The LOTT also made it possible to create new routes, with the result that 25 new concessions were tendered in the late 1980s in what was Spain s first example of time competition for the market in the transport sector. Those concessions attracted a relatively large number of bidders, with 29 companies competing for the Madrid- Algeciras route, 23 for Irún-Algeciras or 21 for Badajoz-Murcia. The comparable prices 3

5 for those newly awarded routes were significantly lower than those of the services that had been extended (OECD, 2000). In 2007, shortly before the first extended concession were due to finish and, therefore, had to be re-awarded again, the Ministry of Transport reached an agreement with incumbent operators, trade unions, bus manufacturers and consumers associations which specified the terms and conditions of the tendering procedure under which those concessions would be awarded. However, the Spanish competition authority heavily criticised that agreement since it considered that favoured the continuity of the incumbent operator and limited the development of competition for the market (CNC 2008). Despite these critiques, nine concessions were awarded under those criteria before the autumn of 2008, when the Ministry of Transport modified the bidding form and included some of the competition authority s recommendations. The 2008 version of the bidding form was used in the tendering of 10 concessions. However, in 2010 a new report of the competition authority argued hat the changes were not substantial (CNC, 2010). The main points of criticism were the bounds set on the bid prices and frequencies, the extra points awarded to the incumbent and the definition of concessions periods of more than 10 years 3. Besides, some companies also brought the process to court and forced the Ministry to publish a third version of the bidding terms in This version was also contentious given that it required the subrogation of the driving workforce under the same existing conditions and, in case of similar outcomes in the bidding process, the incumbent was to retain the concession. As a result, only one concession was awarded before those terms were again taken to court. In 2014 a fourth version of the terms of the bidding terms was published and used to award a new round of concessions, which by this point accumulated and important backlog. 4 In this version a weight of 55% of total points is given to the price and frequency bids, up from 40% in the previous one. Although it eliminates the lower limits to bid prices and eliminates the tranches system used to value them, it continues 3 A law passed in 2013 adapted the length of concessions to the 10 year limit set by the EU s 1370/2007 regulation on public passenger transport services by rail and road. That same law supressed the requisite on operators having an administrative permit to provide services when submitting their bids. 4 A preliminary version of the terms was the object of a report by the competition authory, and some of its recommendations were included in the final version (CNMC, 2014). 4

6 to define an upper bound without explicitly detailing how it is computed. Other features that may be detrimental for competition remain. Firstly, it creates an annual fee to be paid by the concessionaire. The competition authorities repeatedly argued that such a fee, besides increasing the cost of providing the service and possibly being passed through the consumer in the form of higher tariffs, may have an influence on the bidding process and its results. The second feature refers to the requirement to subrogate not only the drivers assigned to the concession (as the LOTT states) but the rest of the personnel attached to it (fare collectors, maintenance and repair personnel, administration, logistics, etc.). This condition was included in the terms of the tendering documents right after the main trade unions and business associations reached an agreement concerning these matters in February 2015, implicitly endorsed by the government when it was published in the official gazette. This may provide an important advantage to the incumbent operator in as much as it will be better able to accept its own workforce and, therefore, does not contribute to increase competition. Another negative effect of the compulsory subrogation is that it transfers labour costs (and any inefficiency related to them) to the future and, therefore, to the final consumers. Since labour costs amount to between 35% and 40% of total costs, this requirement limits in a significant way the ability to obtain efficiency gains through competitive tenders. Thirdly, a three-year experience in the provision of intercity bus services, with a number of vehicles equal or higher than those of the concession, is also required. This condition also favours the incumbent and excludes from the bids potential new firms that may be willing to enter the market and which may show a higher innovation rate. Finally, a relatively high weight (35%) is given to criteria whose quantification depends on value judgements not defined in an explicit formula: comfort levels, rolling stock, attention to the public, connectivity and intermodality, security and availability energy efficiency programme. The uncertainty about how these concepts are computed increases when taking into account that it is possible to discard a bid that does not reach 15 points in this area. 4. Empirical analysis In order to assess whether the changes in the bids terms and conditions have had any impact on the outcomes of the tendering process, we exploit a database that contains 5

7 the results of all the concessions tendered by the Ministry of Transport between 2007 and April All concessions awarded after the respective tendering are included in the database, independently of whether they may have been subsequently reversed after being challenged in court or dismissed because of administrative reasons. The sample includes 56 bidding processes 5, of which 9 correspond to the 2007 version of the bidding form, 10 to the 2008, 6 to the 2011 version and 32 to the one being used since We test the impact of the bids terms and conditions by running a series of regressions in which a set of dummies that identify the type of bidding form used to award the contract are included, besides other variables that may contribute to explain the bidding outcomes. So, the equations to be estimated take the general form where y is the dependent variable of interest, the d t dummy variables measure under which version of the bid forms the concessions was tendered (2008, 2011 or 2014, as explained in the previous section, with the 2007 version acting as reference category), and the X are additional variable that may condition the process Number of bidders Graph 2 shows the distribution of the number of bidders for each of the contracts in the sample. A high concentration of cases with five or less bids can be observed, but also a relatively large number of contracts that attracted 10 or more bids. The aim of this section is to estimate a model that explains if the regime under which each of the contracts was offered may have contributed to attracting a different number of bids. 5 Due to different types of court appeals and incidences, not all the processes are final. However, we include in our database all concessions for which a winner was proclaimed, even if the decision was later reversed. 6

8 Graph 2. Distribution of the number of bids for the contracts included in the sample Series: OFERTAS Sample 1 56 Observations 56 Mean Median Maximum Minimum Std. Dev Skewness Kurtosis Jarque-Bera Probability Table 1 shows the regression results of the number of submitted bids, modelled as a Poisson regression. Besides the dummy variables that identify the version of the bidding terms version, the size of the concession measured in passengers-kms is also included to take into account the potential higher attractiveness that larger concessions may have. As the estimation results show, this variable has a clearly positive impact on the number of bids received. Focusing on the variables of main interest, it can be observed that the changes made in 2008 had no significant impact on the number of submitted bids, but those in 2011 increased them significantly. Although it could be argued that that increase is due to the impact of a single large tender, the positive change is maintained with the 2014 version, without the difference between the estimated coefficients being significant. Table 1. Dependent Variable: Number of bids Method: Poisson White heteroskedasticity-consistent standard errors & covariance Included observations: 56 Variable Coefficient Std. Error t-statistic Prob. Constant Ln Passengers-km version version version Pseudo R-squared Log pseudo-likelihood Wald Chi2 (4) Prob > Chi

9 4.2. Prices. Wining prices are the variable that most clearly would show if the changes in the tendering process have increased the competitive pressure. Table 2 shows the estimation results using as dependent variable the logarithm of the difference between the winning price and the maximum one set in the tendering documents, always expressed in euro cents per km. Explanatory variables include, besides the dummy variables of main interest, the total size of the concession (as logarithm of passengers times network length) and the number of submitted bids. Due to the potential effect of economies of scale and the competitive pressure of additional bidders, both coefficients are expected to be negative. Estimation results show that only the 2014 version of the bidding terms have a significant impact, reducing the winning prices with respect to the starting maximum ones by more than 17%. However, when we estimate the same model but define the dependent variable in absolute price terms (logarithm of the winning price, in real terms euro cents/km), we observe that the 2014 changes had a positive impact on price levels (Table 3). The only way to reconcile this somewhat surprising result with the outcome of the previous regression is that coinciding with that version of the bidding terms the maximum price set in the tendering documents would also have increased. In order to identify such change, we regress the maximum starting price bid on the same set of dependent variables (table 4). Table 2. Dependent Variable: ln (winning price/maximum price) Method: Least Squares White heteroskedasticity-consistent standard errors & covariance Included observations: 45 Variable Coefficient Std. Error t-statistic Prob. Constant Ln(Passengers-km) Number of bids Version Version Version R-squared Mean dependent var Adjusted R-squared S.D. dependent var S.E. of regression Sum squared resid

10 Table 3. Dependent Variable: ln (winning price bid) Method: Least Squares White heteroskedasticity-consistent standard errors & covariance Included observations: 45 Variable Coefficient Std. Error t-statistic Prob. Constant Ln(Passengers-km) Number of bids Version Version Version R-squared Mean dependent var Adjusted R-squared S.D. dependent var S.E. of regression Sum squared resid It can be observed that there has been a clear increase in the maximum price with the 2014 version of the bidding terms. While the 2008 and 2011 versions show a positive but not significantly different from zero increase in the maximum prices, the tenders carried out under the 2014 version reveal an increase beyond 30%, after taking into account the effect that the size of the concession may have on them. As a consequence, the changes in the terms of the tendering procedure have had no effects in reducing the winning prices with respect to the ones in the previous concession of the same route. Table 5 shows that any such effects will have been due to the increase in the number of bidders. Table 4. Dependent Variable: ln (maximum price) Method: Least Squares White heteroskedasticity-consistent standard errors & covariance Included observations: 56 Variable Coefficient Std. Error t-statistic Prob. Constant Ln(Passengers-km) Version Version Version R-squared Mean dependent var Adjusted R-squared S.D. dependent var S.E. of regression Sum squared resid

11 Table 5. Dependent Variable: ln (winning price bid/previous concession price) Method: Least Squares White heteroskedasticity-consistent standard errors & covariance Included observations: 42 Variable Coefficient Std. Error t-statistic Prob. Constant Ln(Passengers-km) Number of bids Version Version Version R-squared Mean dependent var Adjusted R-squared S.D. dependent var S.E. of regression Sum squared resid Conclusions This paper has empirically analysed the effects of different changes that have taken place in the details of tendering procedures for intercity bus services in Spain, focusing on their impact on the number of submitted bids and prices. Although the changes can be interpreted as a progressive relaxation of constraints on competition, the number of bidders only increased significantly with the changes that took place in Regarding prices, the picture is not so clear, since in parallel to the changes in the bidding terms, an increase in the maximum price of each tender seems to have taken place. The consequence is that the change in the winning bid with respect to the tariff of the previous concession is only due to the increase in the number of bidders. References Beck, A. and M. Walter (2013) Factors Affecting Tender Prices in Local Bus Transport. Evidence from Germany, Journal of Transport Economics and Policy, 47(2), Blayac, T. and P. Bougette, Should I go by bus? The liberalization of the long-distance bus industry in France, Transport Policy, 56, 50-62, CNC (2008) Informe sobre la competencia en el transporte interurbano de viajeros en autobús en España. 10

12 CNC (2010) Informe de seguimiento del proceso de renovación de las concesiones estatales de transporte interurbano de viajeros en autobús. CNMC (2014), Informe sobre los pliegos tipo de las condiciones para los contratos de gestión de servicios públicos de transporte regular de uso general de viajeros por carretera (INF/DP/0004/14) Ida, Y. and G. Talit (2015). Regulation of public bus services: The Israeli experience. Transport Policy, 42, OCDE (2000) Competition issues in road transport, Policy Roundtables (DAFFE/CLP(2001)10) OECD, París. Van de Velde, D. (2014). Market initiative regimes in public transport in Europe: Recent developments. Research in Transportation Economics, 48, Van de Velde, D. (2009) Long-distance bus services in Europe: concessions or free market?, The future for Interurban Passenger Transport, 18th International Transport Research Symposium, ITF & OECD, Madrid. 11