Rail transit investments require highest amount of investment costs of all modes and considering the high cost involved, it is particularly important that their performance justifies this high cost and that expectations from these investments are met. Therefore, in the world, it has become an important field of research to study the performances of rail systems in order to assess whether these expectations are met. In Turkey, there is a growing interest in constructing rail transit systems in the cities. However, there has been limited number of studies on the performance of these investments. There are researches on individual systems / yet, there has not been a comprehensive, systematic and comparative evaluation of the rail transit experience of Turkish cities. It is not clear with what expectations these systems are built or whether these expectations are met. There seems to be an urgent need to study these rail investments, with a particular focus on their planning, investment objectives and outcomes. This thesis analyzes the expectations from the rail transit systems in Turkey and answers the question whether these expectations are met. In order to understand the objectives under the planning and decision making processes in the implementation of Turkish rapid rail transport investments, a sample group was selected among the cities currently operating rail transit systems: &amp / #272 / stanbul, Ankara, &amp / #272 / zmir and Bursa. The study sets the objectives in planning and implementing rail transit systems drawn by the answers in the semi-structured interviews. It compares the expectations with the actual outcomes. As the primary indicators of performance, cost and ridership forecast and outcome data are also collected and considered in the comparison. It is found that the main success in all case study cities was the increase in public transport usage after the opening of the rail transit systems. On the other hand, systems performed rather poor in terms of other expectations, such as attaining ridership forecasts, being built within budget, creating an integrated public transport system, traffic reduction, air pollution reduction, improvement of city image, etc. Hence there is a gap between expectations and outcomes.

Submitted by MARCELO LORANDE (marcelomilq@gmail.com) on 2018-09-12T02:06:05Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertação - MSL.pdf: 1806135 bytes, checksum: 104d4a7f94cee09c2d70b23ed78d5fad (MD5) / Rejected by Thais Oliveira (thais.oliveira@fgv.br), reason: Boa noite, Marcelo! Para que possamos aprovar sua Dissertação, serão necessárias apenas duas alterações: - "GETULIO" não tem acento; - Lista de Figuras e Tabelas são posicionadas ANTES do Sumário. Por gentileza, alterar e submeter novamente. Obrigada. on 2018-09-14T21:15:22Z (GMT) / Submitted by MARCELO LORANDE (marcelomilq@gmail.com) on 2018-09-17T02:46:44Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertação - MSL.pdf: 1813262 bytes, checksum: d4225bb320038db9cfeb819e8804a5b8 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Joana Martorini (joana.martorini@fgv.br) on 2018-09-17T15:55:14Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertação - MSL.pdf: 1813262 bytes, checksum: d4225bb320038db9cfeb819e8804a5b8 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Suzane Guimarães (suzane.guimaraes@fgv.br) on 2018-09-18T13:14:49Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertação - MSL.pdf: 1813262 bytes, checksum: d4225bb320038db9cfeb819e8804a5b8 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-09-18T13:14:49Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertação - MSL.pdf: 1813262 bytes, checksum: d4225bb320038db9cfeb819e8804a5b8 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2018-08-17 / Este trabalho propõe a desagregação por componentes de localidade do índice de inflação no Brasil como forma de melhorar o desempenho preditivo de modelos econométricos. Foram desenvolvidos modelos autorregressivos com ou sem variáveis macroeconômicas explicativas para se avaliar como a desagregação impacta em cada um deles. Além disso, foram utilizados dois testes estatísticos para se comparar o desempenho dos modelos, o Model Confidence Set e o Superior Predictive Ability. Observou-se que para curto prazo, como horizontes de até 3 meses, modelos autorregressivos de 1ª ordem possuem desempenho imbatível, ao passo que para horizontes mais distantes, modelo macroeconômicos e desagregados geram previsões estatisticamente superiores. / This work proposes the disaggregation of locality components from Brazil´s inflation index to enhance predictive performance of econometric models. Autorregressive models were implemented with or without explicative macroeconomic variables, in order to evaluate how the disaggregation affects each one of them. Besides that, it has been used two statistical tests to compare model forecast performance, the Model Confidence Set and the Superior Predictive Ability. For short term, up to 3 months, autorregressive models showed unachievable performance, whereas for longer terms, macroeconomic disaggregated models generate statistically superior forecasts.

The conduct of effective economic policy faces a multiplicity of macroeconomic challenges, which requires a wide scope of theoretical and empirical analyses. With a focus on the European Union, this doctoral dissertation consists of two parts which make empirical and methodological contributions to the literature on forecasting real economic activity and on the analysis of business cycles in a boom-bust framework in the light of the EMU enlargement. In the first part, we tackle the problem of publication lags and analyse the role of the information flow in computing short-term forecasts up to one quarter ahead for the euro area GDP and its main components. A huge dataset of monthly indicators is used to estimate simple bridge equations. The individual forecasts are then pooled, using different weighting schemes. To take into consideration the release calendar of each indicator, six forecasts are compiled successively during the quarter. We find that the sequencing of information determines the weight allocated to each block of indicators, especially when the first month of hard data becomes available. This conclusion extends the findings of the recent literature. Moreover, when combining forecasts, two weighting schemes are found to outperform the equal weighting scheme in almost all cases. In the second part, we focus on the potential accession of the new EU Member States in Central and Eastern Europe to the euro area. In contrast to the discussion of Optimum Currency Areas, we follow a non-standard approach for the discussion on abandonment of national currencies the boom-bust theory. We analyse whether evidence for boom-bust cycles is given and draw conclusions whether these countries should join the EMU in the near future. Using a broad range of data sets and empirical methods we document credit market imperfections, comprising asymmetric financing opportunities across sectors, excess foreign currency liabilities and contract enforceability problems both at macro and micro level. Furthermore, we depart from the standard analysis of comovements of business cycles among countries and rather consider long-run and short-run comovements across sectors. While the results differ across countries, we find evidence for credit market imperfections in Central and Eastern Europe and different sectoral reactions to shocks. This gives favour for the assessment of the potential euro accession using this supplementary, non-standard approach.