Hybrid strukturering af danske offentlige-private partnerskaber: Forøget værdiskabelse i offentlige-private partnerskaber

Abstract

In Denmark, the use of Public-Private Partnerships (“PPP”, in Danish: offentlig-privat partnerskab “OPP”) has increased over the recent years; however the Danish municipalities do not utilize the model to the same extent as other European countries. This is mainly due to the complexity of this special public and private co-operation structure, the constraints that municipalities face on their capital expenditures and the high capital costs associated with private financing.In order to develop a hybrid model for future municipal PPPs, this thesis undertakes a study of the Danish municipal PPP-market, the legal environment for PPP-projects and the transaction cost and agency cost problems related to PPP. The object of the thesis is to examine whether and how a hybrid structure, in which the public party acts as a shareholder in the PPP-company, provides a more efficient PPP in terms of value-for-money compared to the traditional PPP-structures. Traditional PPP-models used by Danish municipalities involve either fully public financing or fully private financing and comprises no shareholder-commitment from the public party. This thesis shows that these traditional models entail a fundamental conflict of interest between the municipality and the private parties due to differences in their utility functions (i.e. welfare vs. profit maximisation). The principal-agent problem and the information asymmetry may result in significant transaction costs ex ante as well as ex post. The primary focuses of this thesis are the transaction costs, which incur ex post and the necessity of sufficient safeguards to provide the parties with incentives to undertake relation-specific investments that will generate relational rents.According to principal-agent theory, the introduction of public equity commitment in the PPP-company will reduce the conflict of interest between the parties and thereby the risk of opportunistic behaviour, e.g. moral hazard or hold-up, as the interests of the parties become better aligned. The hybrid structure is found to be justifiable and efficiently applicable only in municipal PPP-projects concerning special-purpose assets (e.g. schools and hospitals) because of the high asset specificity in these projects. According to the framework of Williamson’s model on efficient governance structures, the PPP hybrid model requires the introduction of a new structure named New Hybrid, which is placed between the bilateral and the internal governance as it involves a combination of these different governance structures. This thesis concludes that the innovative and more complex hybrid PPP-governance structure will facilitate greater trust and transparency in the relationship between the public and the private party, consequently leading to additional investments in value-creating activities such as knowledge-sharing routines and relation-specific investments.