Abstract
The Private-Public Partnership (PPP) is still a new model of financing of public needs in Croatia. Namely, regardless of the attitude of the relevant decision maker on national and local levels that this has to be widely used model of financing, there are still only a few PPP projects conducted in Croatia. There are several reasons for that, like administrative barriers, wrong perception of PPP as a model of financing, insufficient information, etc. In fact, in most cases, the PPP stay as an idea, because the intention of using this model of financing is more declarative than a real feasible idea. This chapter presents some actual figures of PPP in Croatia, based on recent research, available data and literature, and consequently, this chapter provides grounds for future research in this area.
TopBlanck Brude at al. (2007) in their paper offered an updated description of the macroeconomic and sector significance of PPPs in Europe, without assessing PPPs from a normative perspective. The description shows that, over the past fifteen years, more than one thousand PPP contracts have been signed in the EU, representing a capital value of almost 200 billion euro. While PPPs have in recent years become increasingly popular in a growing number of European countries, they are of macroeconomic and systemic significance only in the UK, Portugal, and Spain. In all other European countries, the importance of investment through PPPs remains small in comparison to traditional public procurement of investment projects. However, PPP procurement is used extensively for major projects and this is spreading out from transport into other sectors. Although governments increasingly use PPPs, these arrangements still constitute a relatively small component of total public sector investment. The United Kingdom figure of 12% mentioned above is one of the largest. Some countries also informally state that they do not foresee PPPs exceeding 15% of total public investment, one reason being the rather cumbersome process of creating a PPP (OECD, 2008). However, notwithstanding difficulties, countries such as Australia, Germany, Korea and South Africa, as well as France, Portugal and Spain, increasingly use PPPs (Burger & Hawkesworth, 2011). The importance of PPP is even bigger, if we know Europe not only has a euro crisis, it also has a growth crisis. That is because of its chronic failure to encourage ambitious entrepreneurs. Data show that continental Europe has a problem with creating new businesses destined to growth (The Economist, 2012).