Public-private partnerships: theoretical definition and conception

Abstract

Public authorities and business structures are actors who play key role in economic and social development not only on country level, but also in regional and local terms. Interplay of these sides might be realized in several forms. One of them is public-private partnership (PPP) which is used to describe popular form of provision of public goods jointly by the state or municipal bodies and private entrepreneurs. In spite of growing number of researching of public-private partnerships, there is an obscurity in classifying PPP types and to identify this notion clearly among scientists all over the world. However, this kind of cooperation might be considered as an innovative tool for social and economic development on country or regional level. For this reason, it is important to explore the conception of PPP fundamentally. There are different positions to investigate this term from theoretical and practical views. This situation provides discussion which is continuing in recent years in theoretical papers. The research methods based on literature review and analysis were applied to define PPP from different aspects in this study. The purpose of this article is to survey diverse meanings attached to a public-private partnerships and related aspects in literature. Authors identified commonalities and differences between them and determined a reason of variety of views for understanding PPP. Furthermore, different views on PPP meanings are qualitatively compared in terms of the Russian language sources and in foreign literature with understanding of specific aspects of publicprivate partnerships. Despite the variety of approaches for investigate and classify this notion there are characteristics which are common for the most part of positions which are described in this paper.