IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/oxford/v29y2013i1p95-112.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

PPP and PFI: the political economy of building public infrastructure and delivering services

Author

Listed:
  • Paul Hare

Abstract

The Labour government of 1997–2010 used various forms of public–private partnership (PPP) to build schools, hospitals, prisons, and diverse other items of infrastructure, drawing in substantial private capital; it also out-sourced many public services to private providers. This paper starts by reviewing the scale of these activities, and the forms of private-sector engagement that were involved. It then considers the political economy of these forms of ‘privatization’ to understand why and how these methods came to be chosen, including considering what might have happened without private-sector involvement. The effectiveness of PPP and the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) in terms of delivering government objectives and providing infrastructure and services efficiently are examined, taking account of private-sector returns on capital, implications for public spending (including future deficits and debt), the treatment of risk, the provision of incentives to deliver projects to cost and on time, and various other issues. The paper concludes by assessing how far the Labour government’s PPP and PFI programmes can be regarded as successful (and according to what criteria). Copyright 2013, Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Paul Hare, 2013. "PPP and PFI: the political economy of building public infrastructure and delivering services," Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Oxford University Press and Oxford Review of Economic Policy Limited, vol. 29(1), pages 95-112, SPRING.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:oxford:v:29:y:2013:i:1:p:95-112
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/oxrep/grt007
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Avner Offer, 2018. "Patient and impatient capital: time horizons as market boundaries," Oxford Economic and Social History Working Papers _165, University of Oxford, Department of Economics.
    2. Toriqul Bashar & Ivan W. H. Fung & Lara Celine Jaillon & Di Wang, 2021. "Major Obstacles to Public-Private Partnership (PPP)-Financed Infrastructure Development in China," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(12), pages 1-14, June.
    3. Colin Turner, 2018. "The governance of polycentric national infrastructure systems: Evidence from the UK National Infrastructure Plan," Environment and Planning C, , vol. 36(3), pages 513-529, May.
    4. Moore, Mark A. & Boardman, Anthony E. & Vining, Aidan R., 2017. "Analyzing risk in PPP provision of utility services: A social welfare perspective," Utilities Policy, Elsevier, vol. 48(C), pages 210-218.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:oxford:v:29:y:2013:i:1:p:95-112. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/oxrep .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.