Article/Jia Kang of China Economic 50 People Forum
As practical experience tends to be rich and relevant operations become mature, it is urgent for relevant parties to promote the PPP legislation and improve the level of relevant regulations.
Jia Kang: Legalization is the guarantee of PPP sustainability PPP (Public Private Partnership) used to be translated as "public-private partnership". In recent years, it has been translated as "cooperation between government and social capital" in relevant domestic documents, which has become an important practical innovation in China's economic and social development.
According to relevant statistics, as of the first half of 2017, 1357 PPP projects had been completed nationwide, with a year-on-year growth of 31.4%. The average investment scale was 173 million yuan, with a year-on-year growth of 27.8%. The total investment amount of the top ten projects reached 225.9 billion yuan. In the fields of public works, infrastructure, construction and operation of new industrial cities, PPP project construction provides a new mode of financing, management and operation for the cooperation of government, enterprises and professional institutions, which can form a "1+1+1>3" type improvement mechanism. While the government is responsible, enterprises and professional institutions develop "win-win", it promotes the improvement of people's livelihood, and promotes the process of legalization of China's economic society.
While PPP is booming, the recent emphasis of relevant departments on strengthening its standardized management and preventing relevant risks is obviously realistic. The standardized development of PPP should first emphasize the legal construction related to PPP. This is because PPP is a typical case of the government changing its functions or even "changing its own destiny". When a PPP agreement is reached, the government must "lower its profile" and sign with enterprises in an equal partnership. The project operation that takes a long time (usually 10 to 20 years, or even 30 to 50 years) will inevitably experience multiple rounds of local government changes. The preferences of the main leaders of each local government may be different. If there is a "new official ignores the old accounts" style change, what should the enterprises involved in the cooperation do? Therefore, if there is no reliable guarantee of the legal institutional environment, it is difficult for enterprises to participate in more and more PPP projects that should be developed in China in a voluntary way.
Obviously, the healthy and standardized development of PPP objectively needs a good legal environment to constrain, guide and standardize the whole process of PPP, covering the whole life cycle of PPP projects, and put all parties signing the agreement, especially the government and its departments that people feel very "strong", on the track of compliance and performance according to law, and work together to achieve win-win results. Only in this way can market people feel more relieved.
At present, China has a number of "red documents" of the management department on PPP, all of which have the effect of "components of the regulatory system", but these are still the regulatory basis of the lowest legislative level. As practical experience tends to be rich and relevant operations become mature, it is urgent for relevant parties to promote the PPP legislation and improve the level of relevant regulations. If, for some reasons, the basic conditions for implementing PPP legislation are not yet met, it is also necessary to actively consider formulating "PPP regulations", in which the key rules of PPP should be defined and the boundaries of "fake PPP" and "fake PPP" should be clearly excluded, the standards and processes of PPP should be clearly defined, and the national policies to encourage and support the development of PPP should be given a legal basis. In the future, once the conditions are met, the PPP law should be legislated in time to ensure that the system innovation of PPP can continue to move forward.
(The author of this article introduces: member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and researcher of the Chinese Academy of Financial Sciences.)
