Research On VFM Driving Mechanism And Improvement Of Governance Performance For Infrastructure PPP Project

Public-private partnerships(PPP)are widely used to deliver a series of infrastructure projects in china,while there are still many irregularities in the practice of PPP projects.In order to achieve sustainable development of the PPP projects,it is necessary to explore the effective way to realize the economic value and social value of the project at the same time.Previous researches and practical experiences show that the achievement of Value For Money(VFM)of PPP projects are driven by many VFM drivers.The dissertation attempts to research the issue about improvement of PPP governance performance base on the VFM drivers and the driving mechanism.Firstly,the dissertation overviews 754 studies on the PPP infrastructure projects,which are all from international well-known journals,to analysis in depth the theoretical foundation.Through bibliometrics statistics,word frequency analysis and cluster analysis,the results shows that developing countries face more difficult to improve VFM and governance performance,while economic infrastructure projects and usercharge PPP projects need to enhance VFM more effectively.Six research topics are proposed to summary current researches.However,there are still knowledge gaps in VFM driving mechanism and governance performance for PPP infrastructure projects.Secondly,the dissertation constructs VFM drivers list which is including 19 VFM drivers through literature analysis and expert investigation.Meanwhile,VFM drivers are classified into five categories: participators’ abilities and characteristics(PCH),consumer’s demand achievement(CDE),cooperation of public and private sectors(CPP),cost and effectiveness(CEF)and cooperative environment(CEN)after a combination process of face-to-face interviews and a two-round Delphi-type survey.After the identification and categorization of the VFM drivers,questionnaire and analytic hierarchy process help to find the importance and the weight of each VFM driver.The results show that the direct driving degree of CEF is at the top of the list,PCH earns the second place,while CDE is at the bottom of the list.Thirdly,some drivers impact other factors and their interactions appear to be responsible for the achievement of VFM for the PPP projects.Aiming to examine the relationships among VFM drivers,this study develops hypotheses based on literature review and verifies hypotheses via the structural equation model(SEM).The result indicates that CPP significantly influences CEF and PCH,CEN positively impacts CPP and PCH,PCH significantly affects CDE,CDE significantly influence CEF.All the interactive relationships forms driving paths and provides indirect driving degree of VFM drivers.Integrating the results of direct and indirect driving degree,the cooperative driving degree of CEF earns the top of the list,which is followed by CEN,PCH,CPP and CDE.Fourthly,the dissertation defines PPP Projects governance performance as the entities’ process performance and result performance of governing PPP projects along whole life cycle.Grounded theory were used to analysis the successful PPP projects in order to find that decision-making based on VFM influences the achievement of governance objectives.Based on this,the dissertation explores the ways to improve governance performance based on research conclusion about VFM for PPP infrastructure projects.And,internal incentives and reputation incentives for governance entities,reward incentives for private sectors,institutional incentives for cooperation of public and private sectors are proved to be the effective ways to improve governance performance.In addition,suggestions are offered which is including that establishing the public participation mechanism,improving the credit evaluation mechanism of private sectors,optimizing performance payment mechanism,perfecting the policy framework for PPP infrastructure projects.Finally,a case study is carried out to verify all the above research findings.Lesson learnt from project J shows that all VFM drivers helped to enhancing VFM and CEF played the most important role in increasing VFM in project J.Meanwhile,optimization of governance process,enhancement of governance entities’ abilities,incentive of governance entities,improvement of the cooperative environment are all proved to be effective ways to improve governance performance.