Public-Private Partnerships : Trends, Perspectives and Opportunities

In the context of the economic crisis, governments are under increased pressure to find quick answers to hard questions about maintaining public services and funding infrastructure. Public-Private Partnership (PPP) can be used to describe a wide variety of arrangements involving the public and private sectors working together in some way. The key elements for a PPP project are long-term contract; design construction, financing and operation of public infrastructure by the private sector party; payments over the lifetime of the project to the private sector party for the use of the facility made either by the public sector party or by the general public as users of the facility; and facility remaining in the public sector ownership or reverting to public sector ownership at the end of the PPP contract. In this book we go through this concept by analysing not only the opportunities in that field but also the trends and new perspectives. Therefore, this book captures the results of some of the recent research that is being carried out on public-private cooperation.