The Role of Public Capabilities and Institutional Determinants in Public-private Partnerships: a Cross-country Examination
Abstract: Among the variety of alternatives of organizing economic activity, public-private partnerships (PPP) stand apart as a relatively new and underexplored phenomenon. Embodying long-term collaborative relationships between private and public actors to deliver public goods or services, these arrangements differ from traditional forms of organization. They involve cooperation between two distinct types of organizational actors and overlapping economic as well as political markets. By proposing an innovative empirical research study, focused on public-private organizational choices, financing and partnership structure in the case of large infrastructures, we aim to shed an important light on both the public capabilities and institutional determinants to explain the governance structure of PPP, and the characteristics of the public involvement We use a sample of 889 PPP projects extracted from the Thomson Reuters and World bank databases, covering 60 countries and 14 different industries from 1992 to 2012, in a cross-country and cross-industry analysis.
