Who to blame: An inquiry into universal factors accounting for output variations in public–private partnership initiatives across geographical locations. Who to be blamed for not meeting performance,innovativeness, and quality outputs?

With the current controversy and blame game on output of public–private partnership (PPP) initiatives concerns, we investigate why there may be variations in achieving innovativeness, perceived quality, and performance of PPP initiatives across different geographical locations. For instance, we investigate a scenario where “a private company involved in waste management will perform in country ‘A’ but fails to perform in country ‘B’ given the same assignment and target.” We empirically sampled and make conclusions with 475 respondents from the public sector, private sector, and academia based on a survey inquiry. We adopted the structural equation modeling method using the partial least square for the data analysis. The results show that environmental dynamism causes major variations in desired output of PPP initiatives followed by collaboration capacity, environmental fit, and absorptive capacity, respectively. The findings further show that one partner cannot be blamed entirely for causing the failure of PPP initiative. However, we conclude that because on the basis of our data, environmental dynamism, which is as a result of some governmental activities, depicts the highest effect on output, public partners might be more liable. The findings from this study are an explicit view of PPP technocrats, which makes the conclusions more reliable.     

Democracy,property rights and economic growth

What does the global surge in democracy and capitalism portend for economic growth? The shift toward popular government is predicted by some to accelerate growth, by others to retard it. Often left out of the equation is property rights as a factor distinct from democratic rule. Using recent data on 59 less developed and transitional countries, this article explores the relationship among institutional factors and growth in the 1980s and early 1990s. Democratic freedoms and property rights are associated with the dependent variable, suggesting that national income in poor countries stands to gain from recent efforts to implant these institutions.