Abstract

The liberalization of the natural gas market in Europe has been pursued by sectoral EU Directives aimed at progressively opening the market to competition. Not-withstanding the European action, in many member states the development of competition had progressed rather slowly. In this impasse, the gas transportation activity results fundamental for the development of competition in the gas industry given that the pipeline is an essential facility and that the transportation charges heavily influence the final consumer prices. Hence, the transportation tariff system is a key issue in the liberalization process and the pursue of the other regulatory objectives. In this paper we firstly present the different tariff systems for transport which are actually adopted in Europe; then, we investigate the Italian tariff system and, finally, we critically analyse it considering the national market structure and some recent contributions to the economic regulation literature.