Determinants of public-private partnership governance structures: evidence from India

ABSTRACT

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) represent a continuum of governance structures characterized by wide variability in private sector risk transfer. Despite the widespread adoption of PPPs, few studies examine the reasons for such heterogeneity. We investigate the factors explaining variability across PPP governance structures and their impact on the extent of private sector risk transfer using ordinal logistic regression on a novel dataset of 2330 Indian PPP projects. We find that the risk transfer is mainly driven by economic and fiscal factors, service-specific transaction costs and project-specific factors, while political factors and institutional quality barely influence it.

KEYWORDS:

• Public-private partnerships (PPPs)
• governance structures
• public infrastructure services
• risk transfer
• private sector involvement
• PPP contracts

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2024.2349125.

Notes

1. Please refer to Appendix A for detailed definitions of PPP governance structures used for empirical investigation in this paper.

2. Please refer Appendix B for detailed components of governance quality indicators.