A tool for prioritizing multinational transport infrastructure investments

Globalization and the opening of countries' borders, renders transport infrastructure projects more multinational than country specific. Hence, the need arises for a framework tool to prioritize transport infrastructure investments located in more than one country that will form a coherent multinational transport network. This paper presents such a tool, comprising of the procedure for prioritisation, as well as the necessary ex-ante evaluation framework. It is developed in order to be used at a strategic level by the policy makers and to cope with the limited availability and quality of data in the countries concerned. The tool's structure involves four components, constituting the procedural phases (identification, data collection, evaluation and prioritization), ensuring at the first procedural phase the inclusion of all projects, as these are proposed by the countries. The evaluation component of the tool is based on the well-known multi-criteria approach MAUT (Multi Attribute Utility Theory), that employs sufficient but limited criteria reflecting the the transport policy priorities of the countries concerned as well as the available financial resources. In addition, criteria related to financial and economic viability of the projects and their international dimensions are included. The tool has been applied to prioritize transport projects in a multinational transport network, comprising of 21 countries, which are members of the Trans European Motorway and Railway networks (TEM, TER) in Europe with satisfactory results. (C) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.