Club of bologna proceedings

Egil BERGE 
Norway 
I am following up on the same question. I think 
Prof. Sevila started a very important discussion 
about pricing and competition. If you look at 
cost - there are two main parts to it: there’s the 
variable cost - running cost from the day you 
start the test till you are finished with the report, 
and there is the infrastructure cost - the cost of 
building the testing station, of training the per-
sonnel for many years so that they know the 
specialised test procedures, and maybe of deve-
loping new test procedures. And it is impossible 
for most testing stations to be fully occupied ye-
ar round, so part of the time they’re sitting idle. 
And who’s paying for the idle time? I don’t 
think the customers, the companies requiring 
tests, are willing to do so. On the other side, I 
can fully understand that they want some com-
petition, because if you have only one testing 
station available for a certain test, then in the 
long run - after twenty years - maybe that te-
sting station won’t improve because there is no 
competition. So you probably need at least a 
choice of two. But there also probably needs to 
be an agreement on how to calculate the full 
cost, I mean full running cost which does not in-
clude the infrastructure cost. And if it is allowed 
that the infrastructure cost is paid by the state, 
or by whoever wants to do it, then that makes it 
possible also for the smaller countries to have 
some testing activity. Otherwise the benefit of 
volume will lead to all the testing stations being 
located in the bigger nations.