Study On The Factors Influencing The New Period Of PPP Development In China

Since the end of 2013,local governments have initiated a large number of Public–Private Partnership(PPP)projects,but nearly half of them have been withdrawn by local governments since the end of 2017.Meanwhile,the contract signing rate is low and most of PPP investors are state-owned enterprises(SOEs).These phenomenons raised wide concerns about whether PPPs can contribute to the sustainable infrastructure development in urban China.However,due to the lack of micro data about the whole life cycle of PPP projects,there is few empirical studies to analyze the driving mechanism of PPP development from the perspectives of government and social capital.This paper systematically combs the relevant research,and combined with the practice of China's PPP development,extracts the factors that affect the development of China's PPP from the perspectives of government and social capital,and puts forward several empirical hypotheses,which provide theoretical basis for the subsequent empirical research.Firstly,the panel Tobit model is adopted to test the factors that affect the investment scale of PPP projects initiated by the government.The empirical results show that local governments with larger scale of infrastructure demand,higher offbudgetary debts,lower budgetary deficits or higher the level of private capital development tended to initiate more PPP projects.The impacts of off-budgetary debt on economic infrastructure,large projects and government-payment projects are significant,but has no impact on social infrastructure,small projects or user-payment projects.In view of the phenomenon of large-scale PPP projects being withdrawn,this paper further discusses the factors that affect the abuse of PPP.Empirical results show that: only paying attention to the scale of infrastructure demand and ignoring the demand quality will enhance the scale of withdrawn PPP projects;PPP projects initiated under higher off-budgetary burdens were more likely to be inappropriate and subsequently withdrawn;the higher the development level of private capital,the healthier the development of PPP mode of local government.Secondly,the survival model is used to analyze the impact of project contract characteristics on contract signing rate.Empirical results show that the contract signing rate is positively associated with government payment mechanism,shorter concession period,better government endorsement,and higher construction profit.The impact of government payment and contract type is mainly reflected in the central and eastern regions,while the impact of government credit enhancement mainly affects the western and northern regions.Furthermore,this paper uses the multiple discrete choice model to measure the government's preference for different types of enterprises in the PPP bidding process.Empirical results show that,compared with non-SOEs,PPP contracts awarded to SOEs are more attractive to private sectors.Based on the empirical results,we provide policy suggestions to promote the efficiency of PPP initiation by local governments and the participation of social capital.