Japanese Regulation of Truck Transport

Since 1951 the Japanese Ministry of Transport has been vested with sweeping authority to restrict entry and set prices in commercial trucking, but the standard price schedules that it continues to publicize and periodically revise are in fact widely disregarded by commercial trucking firms. There are no economies or diseconomies of scale and firms have expanded until industry profits are exhausted. The changes in truck transport regulation introduced in 1991 were mainly directed at freeing a new activity, parcel delivery service, from regulatory constraints and spreading some of the benefits to others in the industry. J. Japan. Int. Econ., March 2001, 15(1), pp. 1–28. Department of Economics, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina 27695-8110. Copyright 2001 Academic Press.Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: L92, L51.