Publication: Effects of Multilateral Support on Infrastructure PPP Contract Cancellation
Loading...
Date
2016-07
ISSN
Published
2016-07
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
This paper examines the relationship between multilateral support and contract cancellation in long-term infrastructure public-private partnerships. The analysis draws on a large data set and employs a multi-level econometric model to define propensity scores and matching estimators to compare rates of cancellation between projects with multilateral support and a comparison group of public-private partnership projects without multilateral support. The results suggest that multilateral support has a positive effect on the survival of long-term public-private partnership infrastructure contracts. Whereas observed the data suggest that multilateral support has no effect on cancellation rates, a quasi-experimental approach shows that the cancellation rate for projects with multilateral (6 percent) would have been about 48 percent higher without support from multilateral development organizations.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Marcelo, Darwin; House, Schuyler. 2016. Effects of Multilateral Support on Infrastructure PPP Contract Cancellation. Policy Research Working Paper;No. 7751. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/24832 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Publication The Future of Poverty(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-07-15)Climate change is increasingly acknowledged as a critical issue with far-reaching socioeconomic implications that extend well beyond environmental concerns. Among the most pressing challenges is its impact on global poverty. This paper projects the potential impacts of unmitigated climate change on global poverty rates between 2023 and 2050. Building on a study that provided a detailed analysis of how temperature changes affect economic productivity, this paper integrates those findings with binned data from 217 countries, sourced from the World Bank’s Poverty and Inequality Platform. By simulating poverty rates and the number of poor under two climate change scenarios, the paper uncovers some alarming trends. One of the primary findings is that the number of people living in extreme poverty worldwide could be nearly doubled due to climate change. In all scenarios, Sub-Saharan Africa is projected to bear the brunt, contributing the largest number of poor people, with estimates ranging between 40.5 million and 73.5 million by 2050. Another significant finding is the disproportionate impact of inequality on poverty. Even small increases in inequality can lead to substantial rises in poverty levels. For instance, if every country’s Gini coefficient increases by just 1 percent between 2022 and 2050, an additional 8.8 million people could be pushed below the international poverty line by 2050. In a more extreme scenario, where every country’s Gini coefficient increases by 10 percent between 2022 and 2050, the number of people falling into poverty could rise by an additional 148.8 million relative to the baseline scenario. These findings underscore the urgent need for comprehensive climate policies that not only mitigate environmental impacts but also address socioeconomic vulnerabilities.Publication Exports, Labor Markets, and the Environment(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-07-14)What is the environmental impact of exports? Focusing on 2000–20, this paper combines customs, administrative, and census microdata to estimate employment elasticities with respect to exports. The findings show that municipalities that faced increased exports experienced faster growth in formal employment. The elasticities were 0.25 on impact, peaked at 0.4, and remained positive and significant even 10 years after the shock, pointing to a long and protracted labor market adjustment. In the long run, informal employment responds negatively to export shocks. Using a granular taxonomy for economic activities based on their environmental impact, the paper documents that environmentally risky activities have a larger share of employment than environmentally sustainable ones, and that the relationship between these activities and exports is nuanced. Over the short run, environmentally risky employment responds more strongly to exports relative to environmentally sustainable employment. However, over the long run, this pattern reverses, as the impact of exports on environmentally sustainable employment is more persistent.Publication The Macroeconomic Implications of Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation Options(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-29)Estimating the macroeconomic implications of climate change impacts and adaptation options is a topic of intense research. This paper presents a framework in the World Bank's macrostructural model to assess climate-related damages. This approach has been used in many Country Climate and Development Reports, a World Bank diagnostic that identifies priorities to ensure continued development in spite of climate change and climate policy objectives. The methodology captures a set of impact channels through which climate change affects the economy by (1) connecting a set of biophysical models to the macroeconomic model and (2) exploring a set of development and climate scenarios. The paper summarizes the results for five countries, highlighting the sources and magnitudes of their vulnerability --- with estimated gross domestic product losses in 2050 exceeding 10 percent of gross domestic product in some countries and scenarios, although only a small set of impact channels is included. The paper also presents estimates of the macroeconomic gains from sector-level adaptation interventions, considering their upfront costs and avoided climate impacts and finding significant net gross domestic product gains from adaptation opportunities identified in the Country Climate and Development Reports. Finally, the paper discusses the limits of current modeling approaches, and their complementarity with empirical approaches based on historical data series. The integrated modeling approach proposed in this paper can inform policymakers as they make proactive decisions on climate change adaptation and resilience.Publication The Asymmetric Bank Distress Amplifier of Recessions(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-07-11)One defining feature of financial crises, evident in U.S. and international data, is asymmetric bank distress—concentrated losses on a subset of banks. This paper proposes a model in which shocks to borrowers’ productivity dispersion lead to asymmetric bank losses. The framework exhibits a “bank distress amplifier,” exacerbating economic downturns by causing costly bank failures and raising uncertainty about the solvency of banks, thereby pushing banks to deleverage. Quantitative analysis shows that the bank distress amplifier doubles investment decline and increases the spread by 2.5 times during the Great Recession compared to a standard financial accelerator model. The mechanism helps explain how a seemingly small shock can sometimes trigger a large crisis.Publication Impact of Heat Waves on Learning Outcomes and the Role of Conditional Cash Transfers(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-07-14)This paper evaluates the impact of higher temperatures on learning outcomes in Peru. The results suggest that 1 degree above 20°C is equivalent to 7 and 6 percent of a standard deviation of what a student learns in a year for math and reading tests, respectively. These results hold true when the main specification is changed, splitting the sample, collapsing the data at school level, and using other climate specifications. The paper aims to improve understanding of how to deal with the impacts of climate change on learning outcomes in developing countries. The evidence suggests that conditional cash transfer programs can mitigate the negative effects of higher temperatures on students’ learning outcomes in math and reading.
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Do Countries Learn from Experience in Infrastructure PPP?(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-05)Learning from experience to improve future infrastructure public-private partnerships is a focal issue for policy makers, financiers, implementers, and private sector stakeholders. An extensive body of case studies and "lessons learned" aims to improve the likelihood of success and attempts to avoid future contract failures across sectors and geographies. This paper examines whether countries do, indeed, learn from experience to improve the probability of success of public-private partnerships at the national level. The purview of the paper is not to diagnose learning across all aspects of public-private partnerships globally, but rather to focus on whether experience has an effect on the most extreme cases of public-private partnership contract failure, premature contract cancellation. The analysis utilizes mixed-effects probit regression combined with spline models to test empirically whether general public-private partnership experience has an impact on reducing the chances of contract cancellation for future projects. The results confirm what the market intuitively knows, that is, that public-private partnership experience reduces the likelihood of contract cancellation. But the results also provide a perhaps less intuitive finding: the benefits of learning are typically concentrated in the first few public-private partnership deals. Moreover, the results show that the probability of cancellation varies across sectors and suggests the relative complexity of water public-private partnerships compared with energy and transport projects. An estimated $1.5 billion per year could have been saved with interventions and support to reduce cancellations in less experienced countries (those with fewer than 23 prior public-private partnerships).Publication Prioritizing Infrastructure Investments(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-10)Governments worldwide face the difficult challenge of deciding which infrastructure projects to prioritize and select for implementation, given the limits of available funding and the need to attain their developmental goals. The key objective of this report is to conduct a comparative exercise between the World Bank's Infrastructure Prioritization Framework, a multicriteria analysis–based methodology to project prioritization, and a more complex cost-benefit analysis–based approach. The report focuses on Chile, which has a well-institutionalized evaluation process that uses cost-benefit analysis to assess projects on their quality and ability to generate value for money. The analysis compares the results of the Infrastructure Prioritization Framework alongside Chile's current cost-benefit analysis–based and multicriteria analysis approaches to the same subsets of projects in the road transport and water reservoir subsectors, respectively. The results show that the Infrastructure Prioritization Framework has application beyond its original proposition and can complement a traditional cost-benefit analysis by directly considering social and environmental policy goals that are otherwise difficult to quantify in a cost-benefit analysis. The analysis also finds that in Chile there is a discrepancy between the stated goals and objectives of the appraisal system and the actual implementation. In the case of transport sector projects, there is an evident deviation between cost-benefit analysis–based selection policy and actual decisions made for project implementation. In the case of water catchment selection, there is a bias toward projects with higher financial-economic performance as compared to social-environmental performance, despite policy intentions to afford consideration to environmental and social development goals.Publication Prioritizing Infrastructure Investment(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-05)Governments must decide how to allocate limited resources for infrastructure development, particularly since financing gaps have been projected for the coming decades. Social cost-benefit analysis provides sound project appraisal and, when systematically applied, a basis for prioritization. In some instances, however, capacity and resource limitations make extensive economic analyses across all projects unfeasible in the immediate term. This paper responds to a need for expanding the available set of tools for project selection by proposing an alternative prioritization approach that is systematic and feasible within the current resource means of government. The Infrastructure Prioritization Framework is a multi-criteria decision support tool that considers project outcomes along two dimensions, social-environmental and financial-economic. When large sets of small- to medium-sized projects are proposed, resources are limited, and basic project appraisal data (but not full social cost-benefit analysis) are available, the Infrastructure Prioritization Framework can inform project selection by combining selection criteria into social-environmental and financial-economic indexes. These indexes are used to plot projects on a Cartesian plane, and the sector budget is imposed to create a project map for comparison along each dimension. The Infrastructure Prioritization Framework is structured to accommodate multiple policy objectives, attend to social and environmental factors, provide an intuitive platform for displaying results, and take advantage of available data while promoting capacity building and data collection for more sophisticated appraisal methods and selection frameworks. Decision criteria, weighting, and sensitivity analysis should be decided and made transparent in advance of selection, and analysis should be made publicly available and open to third-party review.Publication Prioritizing Infrastructure Investments in Panama(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-04)Infrastructure services are significant determinants of economic development, social welfare, trade, and public health. As such, they typically feature strongly in national development plans. While governments may receive many infrastructure project proposals, however, resources are often insufficient to finance the full set of proposals in the short term. Leading up to 2020, an estimated US$836 billion - 1 trillion will be required each year to meet growth targets worldwide (Ruiz-Nunez and Wei, 2014; World Bank). Global estimates of infrastructure investments required to support economic growth and human development lie in the range of US$65-70 trillion by 2030 (OECD, 2006), while the estimated pool of available funds is limited to approximately US$45 trillion (B20, 2014). The past twenty years have also seen a shift towards decentralized infrastructure planning. Many subnational governments, regional entities, and sector agencies have been delegated responsibility for infrastructure planning promote local responsiveness, but responsibility for allocating funds often remains with a centralized finance agency (CFA). While constituencies may propose numerous projects, governments often have insufficient financial resources to implement the full suite of proposals. This report presents the IPF methodology and results of the pilot application to a select set of transport and water and sanitation projects in Panama. The report first gives background information on infrastructure prioritization in Panama, then follows with a description of the IPF in technical and implementation terms. Next, we present the results of the pilot and close with recommendations for implementing IPF to a wider set of projects.Publication Prioritizing Water Supply Infrastructure Investments in Sri Lanka(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-02)Governments are challenged to balance multiple policy goals and make difficult choices when selecting infrastructure projects for public investment, particularly since available funds are often insufficient to implement the full suite of proposals. This paper presents the application of the Infrastructure Prioritization Framework, a systematic, multi-criteria approach to infrastructure project prioritization, to inform the selection of water supply investments in Sri Lanka. A set of 28 proposed water supply projects was prioritized at the request of the National Planning Department of Sri Lanka, based on consideration of multiple goals, including improved water quality and service, network extension, service provision to poor communities, job creation, and sound financial performance. This paper reviews the Infrastructure Prioritization Framework methodology; presents the results of the prioritization exercise, including an expanded sensitivity analysis; and discusses the way forward to apply the Infrastructure Prioritization Framework to inform infrastructure investment decisions.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Unlocking Blue Carbon Development(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-09-11)The purpose of this paper is to provide a practical framework to guide governments in catalyzing and scaling up public and private investment in Blue Carbon as part of their blue economy development. It does this by describing in detail a Blue Carbon Readiness Framework, a step-by-step, well-illustrated guide with simple checklists. Client countries can use the illustrations and checklists to determine their readiness to catalyze and scale up investment in blue carbon credit finance. The Blue Carbon Readiness Framework consists of three pillars: 1. Data and Analytics; 2. Policy and Institutions; 3. Finance.Publication Sourcebook on the Foundations of Social Protection Delivery Systems(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2020-07-30)The Sourcebook synthesizes real-world experiences and lessons learned of social protection delivery systems from around the world, with a particular focus on social and labor benefits and services. It takes a practical approach, seeking to address concrete “how-to” questions, including: How do countries deliver social protection benefits and services? How do they do so effectively and efficiently? How do they ensure dynamic inclusion, especially for the most vulnerable and needy? How do they promote better coordination and integration—not only among social protection programs but also programs in other parts of government? How can they meet the needs of their intended populations and provide a better client experience? The Sourcebook structures itself around eight key principles that can frame the delivery systems mindset: (1) delivery systems evolve over time, do so in a non-linear fashion, and are affected by the starting point(s); (2) additional efforts should be made to “do simple well”, and to do so from the start rather than trying to remedy by after-the-fact adding-on of features or aspects; (3) quality implementation matters, and weaknesses in the design or structure of any core system element will negatively impact delivery; (4) defining the “first mile” for people interface greatly affects the system and overall delivery, and is most improved when that “first mile” is understood as the weakest link in delivery systems); (5) delivery systems do not operate in a vacuum and thus should not be developed in silos; (6) delivery systems can contribute more broadly to government’s ability to intervene in other sectors, such as health insurance subsidies, scholarships, social energy tariffs, housing benefits, and legal services; (7) there is no single blueprint for delivery systems, but there are commonalities and those common elements constitute the core of the delivery systems framework; (8) inclusion and coordination are pervasive and perennial dual challenges, and they contribute to the objectives of effectiveness and efficiency.Publication Public-Private Partnerships for Urban Water Utilities : A Review of Experiences in Developing Countries(World Bank, 2009-02-01)This study provides objective information and analysis on the performance of public-private partnerships (PPP) projects in urban water supply and sanitation in developing countries. It reviews the spread of urban water PPP projects during the past 15 years, and assesses whether and how they have helped to improve services and expand access for the populations concerned. The study uses a structured framework to assess the performance of more than 65 large water PPP projects that have been in place for at least five years (three years in the case of management contracts) and that provide services to a combined population of almost 100 million. By population size, this sample represents close to 80 percent of the water PPP projects that were awarded before 2003 and have been active for at least three years. The analysis focuses on the actual impact of these projects for the concerned populations, that is, the net improvements achieved under these partnerships. Chapter two summarizes the historical development of water PPPs in developing countries, reviewing the current state of the market, the rate of contract cancellations, and the evolution of the industry. Chapter three reviews the performance of PPP projects in terms of access, service quality, operational efficiency, and tariffs. Chapter four draws conclusions and lessons on how to make public-private partnership a more viable and sustainable option for improving water supply and sanitation (WSS) services in the developing world.Publication World Development Report 2006(Washington, DC, 2005)This year’s Word Development Report (WDR), the twenty-eighth, looks at the role of equity in the development process. It defines equity in terms of two basic principles. The first is equal opportunities: that a person’s chances in life should be determined by his or her talents and efforts, rather than by pre-determined circumstances such as race, gender, social or family background. The second principle is the avoidance of extreme deprivation in outcomes, particularly in health, education and consumption levels. This principle thus includes the objective of poverty reduction. The report’s main message is that, in the long run, the pursuit of equity and the pursuit of economic prosperity are complementary. In addition to detailed chapters exploring these and related issues, the Report contains selected data from the World Development Indicators 2005‹an appendix of economic and social data for over 200 countries. This Report offers practical insights for policymakers, executives, scholars, and all those with an interest in economic development.Publication Classroom Assessment to Support Foundational Literacy(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-03-21)This document focuses primarily on how classroom assessment activities can measure students’ literacy skills as they progress along a learning trajectory towards reading fluently and with comprehension by the end of primary school grades. The document addresses considerations regarding the design and implementation of early grade reading classroom assessment, provides examples of assessment activities from a variety of countries and contexts, and discusses the importance of incorporating classroom assessment practices into teacher training and professional development opportunities for teachers. The structure of the document is as follows. The first section presents definitions and addresses basic questions on classroom assessment. Section 2 covers the intersection between assessment and early grade reading by discussing how learning assessment can measure early grade reading skills following the reading learning trajectory. Section 3 compares some of the most common early grade literacy assessment tools with respect to the early grade reading skills and developmental phases. Section 4 of the document addresses teacher training considerations in developing, scoring, and using early grade reading assessment. Additional issues in assessing reading skills in the classroom and using assessment results to improve teaching and learning are reviewed in section 5. Throughout the document, country cases are presented to demonstrate how assessment activities can be implemented in the classroom in different contexts.