مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

Public Private Partnerships are a public procurement model to provide infrastructures and services through a consortium of private investors (Hellowell and Vecchi, 2012). Governments rely on these partnerships to build, transform and modernize non-traded public services and infrastructures, shifting the burden of infrastructure from capital expenditures to future current expenditures (Shaoul, 2005). Among different partnership-types, Private Finance Initiative (PFI) is based on a fee-type reimbursement of the private partner by the sponsoring public body (Winch and Schmidt, 2016). In other words, “the public sector pays a unitary charge which includes payments for ongoing maintenance of the asset, as well as repayment of, and interest on, debt used to finance the capital costs. The unitary charge, therefore, represents the whole life cost associated with the asset” (HM Treasury, 2016, p. 3).

In PFI contracts, an appropriate risk allocation between the public and private partners is essential to achieve value for money (Khan et al., 2014; Khadaroo, 2014). Since the private sector is in a better position to manage risks at lower costs, the more risks are transferred to the private partner, the more the public partner can extract value from PFIs (Grout, 2005). Nonetheless, finding an optimal and workable risk-balance is not easy and it depends also on the bargaining power of partners (Broadbent and Laughlin, 2003; Broadbent et al., 2008) and on the efforts of partners to negotiate and transfer risks elsewhere (Demirag et al., 2012). Since value for money is linked to risk transferred away from the public partner, it is difficult to assess whether PFIs represent good value for money.

As a result, PFI projects are often perceived as a relatively low risk investment for equity investors, being backed by government support with a stable long-term yield and with many of the major risks shifted from investors to subcontractors (Akintoye et al., 2003; Shaoul, 2011).