Financial mechanism of public-private partnership: features and directions of improvement

Abstract

In recent decades, projects in the field of infrastructure and public-private partnership (PPP) have become increasingly interesting for both the public sector and private investors. In Russia, the option of cooperation between the state and business started developing and spreading not so long ago (in the last 15-20 years). Despite the fact that until 2019, the PPP market in Russia showed a positive trend in various parameters and actively developed, there has been a slowdown in the growth rate of the number of PPP projects since 2020 (3,440 projects in 2020 against 4,285 projects in 2019), which is due to many factors, such as: an increase in the cost of construction materials, a general increase in prices, an increase in inflation, the COVID-19 pandemic, a reduced level of effective demand, an unstable geopolitical situation, etc. At the same time, the total volume of investments in PPP projects continues to grow. Rapid urbanization, changing environmental, social and economic priorities place increasing demands on the ability of governments to attract private finance and motivate companies to develop synergistically with the state. Improving public-private partnership and scaling it up among the corporate sector in Russia is one of the key areas of government activity in order to create better conditions for connecting people and places with opportunities. The purpose of the article is to study the theoretical and practical features of public-private partnership and its financial mechanism, as well as to identify promising areas for solving problems that hinder the effective implementation of projects within the framework of public-private partnership. The subject of the study is an aggregate of economic and organizational-legal relations that contribute to the formation and implementation of the financial mechanism of public-private partnership projects. The methodological basis was the conceptual provisions of the theory of public-private partnership, scientific methods and techniques of analysis. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that the results of the study (in terms of identifying key problems that hinder the effective functioning of PPP projects and their financial mechanism) allowed us to formulate a set of recommendations for their solution.