Public Private Partnerships in Europe - Track to Success, Bottlenecks and Lessons Learned from Different Countries

Abstract

All over Europe Public Private Partnerships (PPP) are becoming an alternative for public sector finance of infrastructure, real estates and services. Current focus for public real estates as PPP is in most countries on schools, hospitals and prisons however all European countries focus on different objectives, implementation strategies and are in a different position on the track to successful implementation of PPPs. Britain is a mature market with over 600 PPP projects in diverse sectors, a continuous project pipeline now certainly exists for schools (Building Schools for the Future programme) and hospitals (NHS LIFT programme), standardisation is under continuous development, there is a strong political support, a public sector comparator test is in place and a secondary financial market for refinancing and restructuring PPP projects already exists. Other countries such as Germany, Italy or Netherlands have already made some experience but all European countries can learn from each other. A key issue of the paper is to present the evolution of PPPs in different European countries, reasons for success, bottlenecks and lessons learned on the basis of a systematic research framework applied to the identified countries. The research framework covers the framework conditions, amount of standardisation, existence of government taskforces, tendering procedures, investment needs, sector focus, applied contractual models, strategic selection of pilot projects as well as different objectives with the implementation of PPPs and different approaches to implement public real estates as PPP projects.