Research On The Impact Of Contractual Flexibility On PPP Project Performance

In recent years,the government widely popularizes and uses the PPP in the field of public infrastructure construction.The PPP project has been booming throughout the country with the guidance of bonus policy.As the PPP project has its own characteristics of long construction cycle,numerous participants etc.,this project has been facing risk pressures from internal and external environmental changes aspects,which leads to an actual complicated operation.Due to a lack of effective assessment of and response to the project complexity,uncertain risks and other factors,some failures occurs,such as the national stadium,the 8th water plant in Shenyang,Wuhan Yangtze Third Bridge,the 10 th water plant in Beijing and so on.The main purpose of contract was to restrain the behavior of two sides formerly,so various entrenched clauses and exceptions were added.But in practice it is found that the entrenched clauses are not allowed to be adjusted after the fact,as a result,the contracting parties suffer heavy losses because of fortuitous events;the exception clauses are used when the government adopt the private sector method because of the distrust in the contractor.The added exception clauses will make the private sector increase their prices or seek opportunistic rent-seeking,and the distrust will circulate in the government sector,and he private sector,which has no benefit to the project.Therefore,the recent research of contract flexibility in academic community are on the rise.These researches mainly theoretically discuss how to achieve the mediation mechanism after the event by contract flexibility and then handle the risks caused by the project uncertainty.But the research on contract flexibility recently focuses on theoretical research and lacks empirical examine.What's worse,there is controversy about the viewpoint that contract flexibility plays an active role in project performance.Based on the huge related articles domestic and overseas,considering the background mentioned above,this paper mainly discussed the PPP project and the relevance theory and research status of contract flexibility,define the connotation of contract flexibility and performance in PPP project,probes the application of contract flexibility from two aspects: the injection way of contract flexibility and the mechanism of contract flexibility,which lays the theoretical foundation of this study.And then,combined literature divide the dimension measurement of contract flexibility and PPP project performance,established its evaluation index system by scientific approach.And on this basis analyze the influence of contract flexibility to PPP project performance and to build theoretical model.In the end,it verifies the effect that the four dimensions of contract flexibility has a promotion to PPP project by the empirical research.the research result can provide a theoretical foundation of the application of contract in PPP project and provide a reference to the practice of PPP project.