PFI/PPP projects are dominated by international construction companies, banks and other financial institutions, facilities management companies (often owned by construction companies) and global chains of management consultants, financial advisers and lawyers that have their own established supply chains. This limits the benefits to be gained in local economies unless they a condition of contract, monitored and enforced. Social benefits are limited by higher charges for community use of facilities. The scale of profiteering in the sale of equity in SPV companies, noted above, is likely to undermine any gains in employment or service delivery equalities.
The World Bank has been a strong advocate and financier of PPPs for over 25 years. The evaluation of the Bank's work on PPPs in developing countries between 2002-2012 revealed a scandalous lack of evidence (Independent Evaluation Group World Bank, 2015):
For the World Bank, no systems exits at all that would track performance of PPPs post project closure. To do justice to the broad effects of PPPs, a wider set of outcome indicators should be kept track of throughout the life of a PPP (ibid).
"Despite the Bank Group's central goal of fighting poverty - reaffirmed by the new strategy's dual goal of ending extreme poverty and promoting shared prosperity - little is recorded on the effects of PPPs on the poor" (ibid).
"Project-level evaluations, IFC's [International Finance Corporation] Development Goals, and its Development Outcome Tracking System measure mainly the operational aspects of a PPP that are relevant to cash flow, such as the number of people that obtained access to infrastructure. Therefore, for only about half of projects are data available for one dimension. There is not a single project with data available for all the above-mentioned dimensions" (ibid).