Background and Theoretical Foundations: Today, the progress of a country in terms of infrastructure, facilities, infrastructure and maintenance requires a lot of capital, which alone is beyond the capacity of the government sector. Also, the public and private sectors do not have a lot of capital on their own, so the best solution for providing capital and high specialized ability to carry out large and long-term projects is the partnership of the public sector with the private sector. In ports, the lack of knowledge and management necessary to provide effective and practical solutions for investment is one of the main reasons for infrastructure financing challenges in sea terminals. It is claimed that public-private partnership infrastructure development leads to better performance compared to conventional contracts, but the empirical evidence for this claim is weak. This paper uses investment data of Middle East and African ports from 2004 to 2022 and estimates the impact of different variables on the share of government ownership in terminal infrastructure projects.
Methodology: This study includes 410 samples from 2004 to 2022. The collected data is categorized based on unique public-private partnership projects in the port. In general, ten factors have been introduced in two groups of institutional quality variables and operating contract variables, which are assumed to be related to the contribution of government intervention in public-private partnership projects in the port. In order to calculate the effect of time and the unique organizational environment of a country, six control variables are presented in this study: government effectiveness index, political stability index, rule of law index, regulatory quality index, economic freedom index and the year of the contract. Since finding the important operational contract and institutional quality factors that affect the share of state ownership in public-private partnership in a port is exploratory in nature, therefore regression is used and since the share of state ownership in public-private partnership in a port is The dependent variable is continuous and the amount of changes in the dependent variable is of particular importance in this study, so as a suitable option, multiple linear regression is used.
Findings: This study tries to investigate the effect of operating contract factors and institutional quality on the share of state ownership in a public-private partnership in a port in developing countries. This experimental model includes ten independent variables, four operational contract variables, six institutional quality variables and two control variables. To evaluate the five hypotheses presented, four multiple linear regression models were created and their results were presented. According to the results, all four presented models are very important and can provide more information about the validity of the model.
Conclusion: Findings show that larger sum of public-private investment, a higher historical proportion of state ownership, the existence of both foreign and different types of private investors are all associated with a higher share of state ownership in port public-private projects. Other findings from the study suggest that the presence of tenders, local private investors, and vertical and horizontal integration are negatively correlated with the share of state ownership. Banks are other private investors, terminal operators and state authorities can benefit from this study. Investors can use it as an evaluation framework when deciding on a project appraisal and the state can benefit at the time of deciding when to take responsibility for port public-private partnership projects.
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