Balancing private investment and community expectations in public-private-partnership projects: A novel approach for evaluating long-term value

Abstract

Balancing private investment and community expectations is always crucial in social Public-private-Partnership (PPP) projects, such as schools, public housing, and hospitals. Evaluating the value of such PPPs requires the governments to accurately assess costs, risks, and benefits through their Public Sector Comparator (PSC). The Public Sector Comparator (PSC) focuses on the economic benefits and tangible value offered by bidders, such as whole-of-life financing costs, capital costs, operation, maintenance costs, and risk allocation as proposed by the government. Non-monetized benefits, which are vital during the delivery of social infrastructure, are typically evaluated heuristically by comparing specific solutions proposed by bidders. However, assessing uncertainties in government requirements and materialized risks when comparing a bid to Public Sector Comparator (PSC) using discounted cost techniques at a specific point in time is challenging. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel approach for evaluating investments that considers non-monetary benefits over a PPP project’s life cycle, based on the risks and benefits seen in recent social PPP projects. Engineering reliability analysis is preferred in this study to emphasize the performance reliability of investment decisions. The proposed reliability-based evaluation considers not only cost uncertainty and non-monetary benefits based on project observations but allows for time-based decision-making by being used at multiple points in time, to be incorporated into the original investment decision. Future case study is expected to demonstrate that the proposed approach allows for predicting long-term value by using a performance reliability index to measure the robustness of the original investment assumptions such as demand projections and future sustainability outcomes.