Public expenditure on railways in Europe: a cross-country comparison

What is and which was, over a long period of time, the overall burden of Italian rail expenditure on public finance? Was it or is it higher or lower than in other countries, taking into consideration different network sizes and traffic? Can it, from a spending review perspective, be reduced? Have governments that have succeeded been able to control expenditure and direct it towards objectives of efficiency, growth within the sector or modal shift? What impact has public railway expenditure given had on the formation of Italian public debt? Since the answers to all of these questions are unknown, this paper aims to reconstruct the total amount of public subsidies paid to the railway sector over the last quarter of a century in five major European countries: Italy, Great Britain, Germany, France and Sweden. The main objective is to evaluate the appropriateness of transfers granted in Italy compared to other European countries in view of containing and rationalising public expenditure, improving overall system efficiency and protecting competition in a market that has, at least from a legal point of view, fully liberalised segments.