Eduardo Engel
U. de Chile & Yale University

Engel

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(Tuesday, 20th May 2014)

Title : The Economics of Public-Private Partnerships

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Public-private partnerships (PPPs) have emerged as an option to provide infrastructure services, somewhere in between public provision and privatization. The experience with PPPs during the last 25 years has been mixed, the good news is that we have learned a lot on when PPPs are the best option (and when not).

The main problems with PPPs have been recurrent renegotiations of contracts, often opportunistic, and the use of PPPs to avoid budgetary controls and anticipate spending. Both these problems are closely related with the governance of PPPs.

This workshop will review recent work on the above issues and recent proposals to deal with both challenges, concentrating on open research questions.

Bibliographical references :

Eduardo Engel, Ronald Fischer and Alexander Galetovic: The Economics of Public-Private Partnerships: A Basic Guide. Cambridge University Press. July 2014. Chapters 1, 7 (must read) and 8.

Engel, Eduardo Fischer, Ronald Galetovic, Alexander “The Basic Public Finance of Public-Private Partnerships” Journal of the European Economic Association, vol. 11, n°1 pp. 83-111.

Eduardo Engel, Ronald Fischer, Alexander Galetovic, "Soft Budgets and Renegotiations in Public-Private Partnerships", NBER Working Paper No. 15300, Issued in August 2009.