The road to Rio: a brief history of the international conferences on competition and ownership in land passenger transport.

The objective of this paper is to set the scene for the Eight International Conference on Competition and Ownership. It is done by reviewing the past seven conferences and then it builds on an earlier paper prepared for the Fifth Conference by Preston and Nash (1997). The paper also draws upon the workshop reports that since the Fourth Conference onwards have appeared in the journal Transport Reviews. It should be noted that the papers from the Sixth and Seventh Conference, along with a discussion page are available on-line. The paper suggests some unifying (or indeed dis-unifying) themes that might stimulate discussion at the conference before drawing some conclusions about the impact of the Conference series.