An overview of PPP policy promotion in China: from 1980-2015

There have been two waves of Public Private Partnership (PPP) development in China respectively between 1980s and 2000s. Since 2013, Chinese central government started promoting PPP, aiming to raise a new boom of PPP again.... [ view full abstract ]

There have been two waves of Public Private Partnership (PPP) development in China respectively between 1980s and 2000s. Since 2013, Chinese central government started promoting PPP, aiming to raise a new boom of PPP again. This article distinguishes these three waves by describing 1) the volume and scale of PPP projects 2) the policies as adopted to promote PPP 3) the extent to which these policies affect the PPP development. Furthermore, by comparing these three waves, the article tries to explore the characteristics of this recent PPP policy promotion with following preliminary findings. 1) Although the PPP policies are claimed to improve public service efficiency and effectiveness, the underlying reason for this strong policy promotion is to release the pressure of government debt; 2) the enterprises that are interested in the current PPP promotion are mostly from the SOEs and less from the private enterprises, which makes PPP become government-government partnerships; 3) while in the last two waves of PPP, the local governments have strong incentives to promote PPP, the policy promotion in this recent PPP development presents the feature of top to down, central to local, and the local governments in various provinces reacted differently.