Adding a Fourth P – for Progress – to the Stalled PPP Model

Moving into the third year since the central government reinvented the borrowed notion of public-private partnerships (PPP) to encourage private investment, local authorities have announced thousands of projects that are to be funded through such a scheme.

As of the end of February, the number of PPP projects in the country has reached 7,110, with planned investments totaling 8.3 trillion yuan. And yet, few of them have broken ground, and many were financed by government-backed enterprises – which fit into the PPP model only because the government broadened the definition of "private."