Research On Legal Issues Of Social Capital Access In PPP Projects

PPP is one of the most widely used models of infrastructure and public services in China.It plays an important role in solving local debt crisis,overcoming government control failures and market inefficiency as well as promoting urban and rural development.Central and local governments have successively issued a series of normative documents to promote the development of PPP projects.Many of them are relating to social capital access which is a significant and fundamental link of PPP.Nonetheless,compared with the social capital withdrawal mechanism,the regulations of social capital access are less practical and scholars have not paid closer attention to this field.Therefore,in order to establish efficient mechanism of social capital access and ensure PPP projects to implement and develop stably,it is indispensable and important to analyze the legal issues of social capital access,draw on relevant international experience and propose suggestions.The article is divided into five parts:The first part refers to the basic theory of PPP and social capital access.It constitutes two aspects: the overview of PPP and social capital access.The former interprets the basic theory of PPP by introducing the definition,the main parties and the scope of PPP,followed by an introduction of main methods of social capital access as well as an analysis of provisions of normative documents included in the latter part,which lays the foundation for further discussion in the following text.The second part is an empirical analysis of the social capital access of the PPP project.On the one hand,this part takes the Chongqing government as a sample and selects five representative projects to grasp current situation of the practice of social capital access in PPP projects by analyzing the scope of PPP,evaluation standard,operation models,current situations,access conditions and social capital types.On the other hand,based on the research findings of the legal issues of PPP of Jiangsu High Court People's Court and precedents of social capital access,this essay aims at searching for the main controversial points and characteristics of social capital access in judicial practice.Some legal issues of social capital access of PPP projects are interpreted in the third part.There are three main problems as regard to social capital access by virtue of the analysis of current regulations,government actions,and judicial practice.The first one is lack oflegislative support,including imperfect legislation and conflicts between regulations.The second one is ambiguous requirement of qualification of the subjects,consisting of the unclear scope of project access and requirements of capital access as well as the non-standardization of social capital.The third problem is relating to loss of procedural regulation.Cross-existing authority of the approval departments,complicated approval process,unreasonable social capital selection process and the preference of state-owned enterprises are involved.The fourth part focuses on discussing the issues shown above and drawing on international experience of social capital access,beginning with an introduction of foreign legal system of PPP.Then a discussion of clear qualification social capital access subject and standardized access procedure is followed by an analysis of relevant regulations of the United Kingdom,Australia,Canada and other countries in the part.The purpose of the fifth part is seeking a way which is based on the current situation of PPP projects in China and relevant foreign experience to solve the legal problems of social capital access.Three suggestions are given in this part: perfecting the legislation of PPP,clarifying requirements of qualifications of social capital access and optimizing the social capital access procedures.