PLANNING FOR TRANSPORT INVESTMENT IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF IRAN.

Thus we have seen that when planning transport and communication development programs in relation to the rest of the economy, the economist is forced, due to both the planning process timing and the relative time perspectives, to frame the infrastructure development more in terms of basic factor analysis than in the detailed translation of individual commodity or trade requirements. Also we have seen how conventional cost-benefit analyses are fraught with difficulties. Some of these difficulties are found in other sectors of the economy as well (e.g., in education and health), but in transport and communication in combination with our first finding, marginal cost-benefit investment analysis is limited in its usefulness. These two observations suggest that economic planning in transport and communication in developing economies needs to be made with an approach geared to the staged timing and long-run design of economic development; that integrated transport and communication development needs to be designed in terms of such basic factors as land mass, population, natural resources, trade, etc. in relation to the perspective values of the country's inputs and the technological and engineering constraints. Hence it is in these terms rather than in the more traditional short-ranged cost-benefit project analyses that the transport and communication economists should concentrate a far greater amount of their efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]