Conclusions and Next Steps

Procuring Infrastructure PPPs 2018 reveals that there is significant room for improvement in the PPP regulatory framework of most of the 135 countries assessed during this exercise. Moreover, the lower the income level of the group, the lower the performance in the four assessed thematic areas: preparation, procurement, contract management, and management of USPs. However, it is important to note that preparation and contract management are the weakest performing areas across all income level groups and they are also the weakest areas with respect to adopting good transparency practices.

The average performance also varies greatly by region. The high-income economies of the OECD and the Latin American and Caribbean regions perform at or above the average in all thematic areas. In contrast, Sub-Saharan Africa and the East Asia and Pacific region have the lowest average scores across thematic areas.

Many of the economies assessed undertook some type of reform affecting the PPP regulatory framework in the past decade and in many others, efforts are underway to improve PPP regulations. In 76 of the 135 economies assessed, reforms were ongoing and/or are planned after the cutoff date of this report (June 1, 2017).

The Procuring Infrastructure PPPs 2018 exercise aims to help governments by identifying areas of improvement to achieve more transparent, competitive, and efficient PPP procurement systems, and by providing a global assessment to learn from other countries' experience.

The methodology of the 2018 edition has incorporated inputs received during the dissemination of the previous edition and it is expected that it will continuously be improved in the hope of making the analysis in the next edition of this report even more robust. Methodology changes are anticipated in future editions of this report, and the team welcomes feedback on the methodology used in this year's report.

The thematic scope of the report could be expanded in future years. For example, better consideration could be given to subnational projects and data collection from outside the transportation sector (the current case study of the survey).

Expanding the geographic scope of economies covered is always desirable. However, this year's edition included all emerging markets and development economies that have had at least one infrastructure PPP project in the last five years. Thus, expanding beyond these economies may prove difficult because of the lack of contributors with sufficient experience with the procurement of PPPs.

Finally, while this report assesses the PPP regulatory framework, the ultimate aim is to ascertain the impacts of that framework on infrastructure investments. Measuring such impacts is a challenge because of the lack of data on outcome indicators. This remains an area for future research.