This report is based on information developed and maintained by the editor of Public Works Financing (PWF), a periodical which provides information and views regarding financing issues, trends, methods, and projects involving public-use infrastructure. The data used for this study comes from the 2004 version of the International Public Works Financing Projects database. This database includes almost 2,100 public use infrastructure projects from around the world that have been proposed and/or developed over the past 20 years using private financing or project delivery through a public-private partnership. These include projects for roads, bridges, and tunnels (the focus of this report), plus railroads, airports, seaports, water/wastewater facilities, and buildings.
The database includes completed and proposed projects, some of which may be changed significantly, dropped entirely, or replaced. In developing the regional and national summaries by project and contract type, projects were omitted that lacked sufficient information to permit the calculation of average project cost or define the contract type. No effort was made to independently verify the information contained in the PWF database. Therefore, the information contained in this report should be considered as approximate and not a definitive or exact indication of PPP activity by country, project type, or contract type.
Among the surface transportation categories noted in the database, the following are most relevant to the highway arena:
In addition to project type, the database provides a variety of information on each project, including the following attributes, as available:
• Overall project description and timing
• Contract type
• Region and country
• Project status
• Public sponsor
• Private developer/partner
• Project cost
• Financier
The nature of the public-private partnership for each project is defined by the type of contract used to bind the private and public partners to the project. The following lists different types of PPP contracts included in the PWF database. Each represents varying levels of private sector responsibility for functions comprising the infrastructure asset life cycle:
• Management contract
• Design-build
• Design-build-operate-maintain
• Design-build-finance-operate
• Build-operate-transfer
• Build-transfer-operate
• Build-own-operate
• Joint development agreement
• Concession
• Asset sale
This report contains cross-tabulations of different kinds of road, bridge, and tunnel projects by contract type, project size, and region (with most active countries noted). This synthesis provides an informative profile of the common characteristics and contrasts in the types of PPP projects and their contracting approaches between regions and countries around the world. The results provide a valuable reference tool for those interested in developing PPP arrangements for proposed highway, bridge, or tunnel projects in the United States by demonstrating what other nations have and are doing. Overseas trends in the use of different contracting approaches for delivering major highway infrastructure projects through public-private partnerships may portend possible directions for transportation infrastructure PPPs to take in the future, as the PPP market matures in the United States.