CONCEPTUAL PROBLEMS OF COMPREHENSIVE INTERPRETATION OF PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIP

Abstract

It has been established that there is still no generally accepted and established definition of public-private partnership in both foreign and domestic literature. In some definitions, the conditional uncertainty of the essence of this concept is deliberately embedded. Thus, the European Investment Bank (EIB) defines a public-private partnership as an agreement between an institution representing public authorities and a private partner, intended for the implementation of public infrastructure projects and public services within the framework of a long-term contract. Since this resolution does not record the nature of such agreements, does not indicate the principles of the relationship between the private and public sectors, then the EIB documents focus, first of all, on the fact that the private sector can receive financial benefits in two ways: payments are made by a state body to a private partner based on the diagnosis of the results of service provision (for example, road availability); the private partner is granted the right to receive revenue from the provision of the service (for example, to introduce and collect tolls for the use of roads). The definitions of the World Bank and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) are similar and emphasize that a public-private partnership is a long-term contract between the public and private sectors in which significant responsibility rests with the private sector in the field of management, as well as the private sector assumes most of the risks in the implementation of this project. The OECD also emphasizes in its definition the fact that the transfer of risk to a private partner largely depends on the effectiveness of such a project, and that the state's goals are aligned with the private sector's profit-maximizing goals. These definitions are quite cumbersome and detailed, but even they have not become universal and able to cover various options and forms of implementation of public-private partnership. The generalization of the existing approaches to the definition of public-private partnership was further developed, with the selection of three main interpretations: broad (implies the inclusion in the content of the concept of public-private partnership, various options for the interaction of the state and the private sector, aimed at solving any tasks in any spheres of social life); narrow interpretation (presupposes that within the framework of a public-private partnership, the state and business are united to implement a specific investment project regarding those objects that belong to the sphere of public interest and control, for example, related to the production and offer of any public good); contractual (related to the dual nature of the concept of public-private partnership, which involves not only its socio-economic essence, but also its legal one. With this interpretation, the public-private partnership is considered as a specific contract, the subject of which is various works on the construction and use of within the framework of this approach, the concept of public-private partnership is filled with various features and essential conditions of this specific contract, and the subject composition of the participants of contractual relations is also determined).

Keywords

• relations between private and public sectors
• public partner
• public-private partnership
• private partner
• project