Public private partnerships

public private partnerships: best practices for regional and fiscal polices

Early in 2005 the EBRD initiated a project aimed at studying lessons and best practices of Public Private Partnerships as far as regional policies are concerned. The idea behind the project was to compare and summarise ways in which countries apply PPP on a state and sub-sovereign level and how this affects fiscal policy and division of responsibilities between authorities of different level. The project was launched in response to strong interest of governments of at least six countries of the EBRD operations. In particular, the project focused on:

• Global best practice common to countries with successfully executed PPP projects/transactions, with a primary focus on fiscal policies and the share of responsibilities between central government, regional and local authorities;

• Guidelines to the development of PPP on behalf of the Public Sector, with reference to both national and Regional Governments

To undertake this review it was felt that this task would be best carried out over a sample of countries selected to be representative of the wide variety of PPP experiences around the world to allow drawing conclusions that are applicable to a broad context of PPP initiation as well as governmental organisations.

It was felt important that the sample of countries to be investigated should allow wide variations over the following three key parameters, expected to play major catalyst roles for the delivery of PPP transactions at the local level, to allow the study of their impacts:

• Common vs. Civil Law countries;
  

• Unitary vs. Federal structure;

• Well established vs. infant structures in the process of implementing PPPs.

Consequently, a sample of countries was selected and organised in two categories. A first category representing more successful PPP experiences and includes variations among the first and second criteria above. The countries selected were:

• Australia, Hungary, Netherlands, Portugal and UK

The second category included countries at the early stages of implementing PPPs with a mixture of failing and successful experiences. The countries selected were:

• Croatia, Czech Republic and Romania.

The Report  (2.5Mb) starts with an Executive Summary  (0.3Mb) which the EBRD strongly recommends interested governments translate into their respective language.