Governing Public-Private Partnerships: The Problem of Low-Cost Decisions

In many cases, the expected efficiency advantages of public-private partnership (PPP) projects as a specific form of infrastructure provision did not materialize ex post. From a Public Choice perspective, one simple explanation for many of the problems surrounded by the governance of PPPs is that the public decision-makers being involved in the process of initiating and implementing PPP projects (namely, politicians and public bureaucrats) in many situations make low- cost decisions in the sense of Kirchgässner (1948–2017). That is, their decisions may have a high impact on the wealth of the jurisdiction in which the PPP is located (most notably, on the welfare of citizen-taxpayers in this jurisdiction) but, at the same time, these decisions often only have a low impact on the private welfare of the individual decision-makers in politics and bureaucracy. The latter, for example, in many settings often have a low economic incentive to monitor/control what the private-sector partners are doing (or not doing) within a PPP arrangement. The purpose of this paper is to draw greater attention to the problems created by low-cost decisions for the governance of PPPs. Moreover, the paper discusses potential remedies arising from the viewpoint of Public Choice and Constitutional Political Economy.

Property, predation and socialist reality

Economics as a social science is about exchange and the institutions within which exchange relationships are formed and transactions are executed. Yoram Barzel's contribution to economics and political economy reflect this focus on exchange and institutions. In this paper, I will sketch a theory of real-existing socialist economies from a property rights/public choice perspective. Then I present the puzzles in political economy that such a system confronted in attempting to create a prosperous, regenerating and competitive economic system. I then conclude with a short discussion of the future for a progressive research program in political economy that takes institutional change seriously.

Public Choice, Public Administration, and Self-Governance

Chapter 5 illuminates the specific nature of the synthesis attempted by the Ostroms’ and their associates and discusses the successes as well as the failures of their endeavors. Their effort to promote the public choice perspective in public administration, and the public administration perspective in public choice and to advance on that basis a paradigm change (from “bureaucratic public administration” to “democratic public administration”) is presented as a reference point, a model and case study entailing several lessons about the nature and limits of such endeavors. The chapter also builds upon the work of Michael Spicer, a remarkable author who has kept alive this type of approach in the field of public administration by combining public choice and knowledge process theory, long after the initial effect of the Ostroms’ efforts faded.

Voting at the U.S. Constitutional Convention

This chapter describes how the public-choice perspective has provided new insights into the U.S. Constitutional Convention of 1787. It reviews articles on the impact of the rules of the Convention, attempts to infer delegate votes, and reviews how public choice has helped us understand the adoption of various clauses in the Constitution and studies of the Beard thesis.