| Since the Decision of the CCCPC on Some Major Issues Concerning Comprehensively Deepening the Reform,which was adopted at the Third Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee,proposed to increase government purchase in the field of public services and allow private capital to participate in urban infrastructure investment and operation by franchising and other means,the government and private capital cooperation model(PPP model)began to enter a period of rapid development in China.Through the PPP model,various regions have leveraged more funds into the field of public products and services with financial funds and resources,accelerated the mending of short boards,driven a significant increase in the level of public products and service guaranteed level,and achieved the important goals such as stabilizing investment,preserving employment and ensuring security in basic living needs.However,the development and problems of any new things always go hand in hand.By summarizing the regulatory documents issued by the central government and ministries,we find that there are two major types of problems in the promotion and application of PPP model in China.(1)Local governments have alienated the PPP model as a method to raise debt for their own financing,which not only reducing the efficiency of using financial funds,indulging and increasing the risk of local government debts,but also pushes the trend.(2)The participation of private capital is too low,and local governments are more prone to breaching trust in cooperation with private capital.These two types of issues have detracted from the central government's objective of improving the efficiency of public goods and services by promoting the use of the PPP model,and have not been properly addressed.Many scholars have made suggestions to promote the standardized implementation of the PPP model in China,such as speeding up the legislation on the PPP model,setting up an independent and unified authority,introducing arbitration as a dispute resolution mechanism,and supervising the PPP model through auditing.However,under the constraints of China's current legislative plan,the process and principles of institutional reform and the current environment of the relevant legal system,the feasibility or effectiveness of many of the recommendations made in the above-mentioned studies is doubtful in reality,and these recommendations have either not been adopted or have been adopted but not effectively implemented in a timely manner or with poor results,resulting in the frequent occurrence of both types of problems.Since the 18th National Congress of the Party,especially after the establishment of the Central Auditing Commission,a new round of reform of the national audit management system has been launched,and efforts have been made to build a "centralized,unified,comprehensive,authoritative and efficient" audit supervision system,which has expanded the breadth and depth of national audit supervision.In this context,it is not only of theoretical significance,but also an urgent and practical issue to study how to improve the governance of China's PPP model by reconstructing the intervention of state audit to solve the above two major problems.Based on the above,the main research of this paper includes:(1)Based on transaction cost theory,political theory of transaction cost,principal-agent theory,game theory and state audit theory,we construct a theoretical model to analyze the causes,influencing factors and solutions of two types of problems that arise in the process of promoting the use of PPP model in China.(2)Based on the relevant policy documents,we summarize the overall institutional arrangement of PPP model in China,and analyze the governance structure characteristics of political and economic contracts under the promotion of PPP model,explore the behavior logic of local government and private capital under such governance structure characteristics,and argue the natural logic of state audit intervention in PPP model on this basis.(3)Based on the real situation,we set up an evolutionary game model based on the strategic revenue functions of four parties,namely local government,private capital,the public and the central government,to analyse the behavior evolution of each subject,analyse their influencing factors,observe the evolutionary equilibrium point under the final four-party evolutionary game,and make a comprehensive analysis of the desired more effective equilibrium point,i.e.local government standardizing the implementation of the PPP model,private capital actively invests in PPP model,the analysis of the influencing factors is also carried out,and establish a system of natural measures for state audit's intervention in PPP model governance.(4)To test whether the state audit intervention can effectively influence the behavioral benefit functions of local governments,private capital,the public and the central government,and thus make new behavioral choices in the implementation of the PPP model to achieve effective solutions to the two major problems.From the study of the above,the following conclusions are drawn:(1)The policy process of promoting the use of PPP model in China can be regarded as two activities:the central government and the jurisdiction public entrust the local government to adopt the PPP model to supply public goods and services according to circumstances,and the local government selects the suitable social capital to cooperate in using the PPP model to supply public goods and services through public bidding or procurement,and the essence of the two activities is political contract and economic contract,and the two problems mentioned above are high transaction cost,so reducing the transaction cost of the two contracts plays a fundamental role in the realization of the policy goal of promoting the use of PPP mode in China.We use transaction cost theory,political theory of transaction cost,principal-agent theory,game theory and theory of state audit to analyze and discuss the policy process of promoting PPP model,and point out that the key to reduce transaction cost is to build a reasonable contractual arrangement,the nature of state auditing determines the desirable rationality of its involvement in the governance of the PPP model.(2)The political contract in the PPP model under the existing institutional arrangement is characterized by amplified information asymmetry in the vertical and horizontal principal-agent relationship,weakened constraints in the common agency relationship,and conflicting identities in the multiple agency relationship;the economic contract is characterized by multi-sectoral regulation,unequal status of local government and private capital,amplified incomplete contracts,and inefficient dispute resolution mechanisms.Under the characteristics of political contract,local governments take advantage of information asymmetry and their multi-tasking agents and multiple identities to derive various opportunistic behaviors for self-interest motives.Private capital invests negatively in the PPP model due to the high risk cost and the weakened incentives caused by the economic contract characteristics.The new positioning of state audit in deepening reform and development determines that its intervention can achieve effective control over the opportunistic behavior of local governments in the PPP model,or can help the efficient resolution of related disputes,and can effectively coordinate conflicting policy documents and interdepartmental regulatory conflicts,thus reducing the transaction costs in both contracts.(3)State audit can intervene in the governance of the PPP model by coordinating audit plans,scientifically selecting audit organization methods and audit implementation methods,coordinating conflicting policy documents and inter-departmental regulatory conflicts,ensuring scientific decision-making on PPP projects,promoting fair competition among market players,protecting public interests and the legitimate rights and interests of private capital,and helping to resolve disputes,among other specific measures.After the intervention of national audit,the speculative gain expectation of local government's opportunistic behavior decreases and the constraint expectation increases,so that the opportunistic tendency is no longer the optimal choice of local government;the weakened incentive of private capital under the institutional arrangement of PPP model economic contract is alleviated,for the expected loss caused by the possible opportunistic tendency of local government is greatly reduced and the cost of information collection and dispute resolution decreases,thereby active investing in the PPP model will become the optimal choice for private capital.The cost of active public participation in the PPP model is also greatly reduced by the involvement of the state audit,but it is uncertain whether the public will actively participate in the PPP model or not.The central government does not have to pay the cost of reconstructing the macro-institutional arrangements of the PPP model after the state audit intervention,the specific institutional arrangements of the two contracts are improved,and the central government achieves its policy objectives of promoting the application of the PPP model.The possible innovations of this paper are:(1)Using the various regulatory policy documents issued by the central government to summarize the various problems arising in the practice of China's PPP model into two major categories of problems,and cleverly defining the context of the two categories of problems arising in the entire process of the central government's promotion and application of the PPP model in turn as two transaction activities that are interlinked and intersected,and under the framework of the theory of transaction costs and the theory of the politics of transaction costs,defining the two transaction activities as two transaction contracts,and the fundamental role of reducing the transaction costs in the two transaction activities is proposed to achieve the efficiency objectives of the PPP model.It answers the question of why the PPP model in China is so problematic in practice,and why various solutions have been proposed but not adopted in practice or not implemented effectively in time,resulting in the recurrence of both types of problems.(2)Compared with previous studies on PPP model auditing,the functions of state auditing in the process of deepening reform and development in the new era have been further expanded in a bold but not obviously detached from the reality of PPP model governance,combining relevant audit theories,various policy documents related to deepening reform and development of state auditing and relevant real-life audit cases to comprehensively demonstrate that the intervention measures of state auditing can achieve a considerable degree of the proposed alternative to the various methods mentioned in many studies,which may be limited in reality due to the resistance and costs of major institutional adjustments,speeding up relevant legislation,setting up a dedicated management organization,improving the arbitration mechanism reforming,establishes a system to improve the governance of the PPP model through state audit intervention,prompting local governments to regulate their own behaviour,coordinating the regulation of relevant departments to ensure that its governance value is truly realized by strengthening incentives for private capital.This will not only improve the governance of the PPP model to a certain extent,but also partly help the national audit to fulfil the important mission given to it in the new era.(3)Due to the complexity of the model construction,the evolutionary game model used in previous studies to analyze the complex game system among different stakeholders is mostly limited to three parties or the system with more than three parties is split into several subsystems containing three parties or two parties,and the number of parameters included in the revenue function of each party is set as simple as possible.In order to simulate the real situation,this paper constructs a huge evolutionary game system model with 107 parameters,including local government,private capital,public,central government and state audit,and simulates the evolution of each party's behavior to find out the factors influencing each party's behavior in the process of promoting the use of the PPP model and to test the effect of state audit intervention. |
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