Citation:

Jia Kang, Chen Tong, Tang Dantong. "The Theory, Practice and Improvement in Providing “Rights – Ethical Public Goods” with PPP" International Research Journal of Economics and Management Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 32-39, 2023.

Abstract:

With the development of the economy and society, the rights and interests of social members and the content of social ethics continue to evolve, and the scope of public services also expands, forming a spectrum of public goods consisting of “pure public goods”, “quasi-public goods” and “rights-ethical public goods”. In order to solve the contradiction between the supply and demand of public goods, the PPP model in which the government and social capital cooperate to provide public goods came into being. PPP has a variety of specific models. In theory, government procured projects and services, franchising, and equity cooperation are respectively applicable to “pure public goods”, “quasi-public goods” and “rightsethical public goods”. Among them, “rights-ethical public goods” refer to public goods that have intuitive private product attributes according to the definition of traditional economic concepts, and should be provided by the government as determined by the common social value orientation and collective political choice. However, due to its existence or inability to completely exclude competition and exclusivity in its actual form, the traditional government supply method is not efficient, and it is the best choice to let market entities participate in its supply. To supply “rights-ethical public goods” through PPP, social capital parties with both construction ability and operation resources should be selected and allowed to participate in the whole process of public goods supply, such as investment, construction, management and operation, so as to form and give play to the quality and efficiency advantages of the construction and operation aggregates. In this process, it is necessary not only to ensure that social capital parties obtain reasonable investment returns to encourage their active participation, but also to form a constraint and incentive mechanism for social capital parties’ construction and operation behaviors through effective supervision and performance evaluation, so as to achieve efficient and high-quality supply of public goods. However, due to the imperfect system, unclear understanding of participants and low quality of relevant personnel, there are problems in the practice of “rights-ethical PPP projects”, such as the separation between construction and operation, and unclear asset ownership. More concretely, social capital usually has the construction qualification, but lacks operation experience, and transfers the project operation to public institutions or other operating entities after the completion of project construction. Although the problem of project construction financing has been solved, the high-quality supply of public goods has been neglected, and the resource integration effect of the PPP model has not been brought into full play, and the asset ownership problem of the project has not been effectively solved at the rule of the law level. Social capital parties worry that neither the inherent property rights nor the long-term operating income will be obtained, so they pay more attention to short-term returns such as construction profits, which is not conducive to long-term mutual trust and cooperation between the government and social capital parties. Therefore, it is necessary to speed up the construction of the rule of law in the operation of PPP projects. While promoting the standardized (rule of law, specialization and sunshine) development of all PPP projects, the “construction-operation integration” mechanism of “rights-ethical PPP projects” should be strengthened and optimized. At the legislative level, it is necessary to form a clear ownership structure and distribution structure of rights and responsibilities for the PPP model, and to establish and improve a comprehensive performance evaluation mechanism based on the whole life cycle of the project and the supervision mechanism with multi-subject participation. In addition, it is necessary to change the concept, to correctly understand the “rights-ethical public goods”, be determined to innovate, to improve the quality of relevant personnel, and to promote the improvement and high-quality development of “rights-ethical PPP projects”.

References:

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Keywords:

rights-ethical public goods, PPP model, public goods supply mode, social capital, integration of construction and operation.