Research On Social Impact Assessment For PPP Highway Projects Of China

With the ability to alleviate government's fiscal pressure in infrastructure development and promote regional economy development and social progress, Public-Private Partnership (PPP) is identified by the government as an important tool for financing major infrastructures like highway in China. However, some negative social impacts and social acceptability issues currently exist in some real PPP highway projects, such as the non-reasonable tariff scheme and concession duration, lack of public participation; nonstandard transferring procedures of concession right, which leads to the unsuccessful outputs in the PPP implementations. Therefore, this dissertation aims to explore the social impacts of PPP highway projects in order to enhance the social understanding and acceptability of the PPP financing modality and its application in the highway area in China.Firstly, this dissertation looked at the leading causes and influencing mechanisms of the social impacts in PPP highway project based on the review of the characteristics and Social Impact Assessment (SIA) theory; Preliminary social impact factors of PPP highway projects were also identified through a case study of Jing-shi highway, capital airport highway and Shanghai Hu-Jia-Liu highway and a comparative analysis of 16 index systems for social impact assessment; PPP-based highway social impact factors were then determined and ranked after a structured interviews with 29 domestic experts.Second, according to their influencing degrees, SIA factors were classified into three levels, macro, meso and micro levels; Tariff scheme, concession duration and Government performance, which were considered as key SIA factors in the expert interviews, were discussed in detail and relative recommendations for improvement were then provided; Based on the above, a framework for social impact analysis of PPP highway projects is proposed, which insists of two steps and four stages, including selection of indicators, setting up of index system, selection of assessing methods, social impact assessment, application and analysis of evaluation findings, and continuous improvement of social acceptability of the PPP highway.Finally, a second round interview was carried out to validate the efficiency of the proposed evaluation index systems and framework. The results showed that the factors identified were acceptable. In addition, the dissertation also gave a special chapter to analyze the social impacts, pros and cons of government loan roads and PPP highway projects by a review of the Audit Commission's audit report on highways in 18 provinces in 2008, which again proved the validity of the research findings.