Are Public Private Partnerships that Rigid ? And Why ? : Evidence from Toll Road Concession Contracts

Transport concession contracts are commonly said to be standardized and too rigid. They would not allow public authorities to adapt them to evolving context and circumstances. This paper aims at challenging this view and, more particularly, the view that contractual rigidity for transport concessions is exogenous. Using a transaction cost framework, we disentangle between three main determinants of contractual rigidity: traffic uncertainty; connivance between contracting parties; quality of the institutional environment. Using an original database of toll road concession contracts, we observe a great variety of provisions for toll adjustment. We find that these exogenous determinants significantly influence contractual choices

Local Public-Services Provision under Public Private Partnershps : Contractual Design and Contracting Parties Incentives

This paper studies the incentives of the private provider, but also of the public authority, under various contractual forms of Public Private Partnerships (PPPs). A critical aspect of any PPP contract is the allocation of demand risk between the public authority and the private provider. I show that contracts in which the private provider bears demand risk motivate more the public authority from responding to customer needs. This is due to the fact that consumers are empowered when the private provider bears demand risk, i.e. they have the possibility to oust the private provider in case of non-satisfaction with the service provision, which provides procuring authorities with more credibility in side-trading and then more incentives to be responsive. However, contracts in which the private provider does not bear demand risk motivate more the private provider from investing in cost-reducing efforts. I highlight then a tradeoff in the allocation of demand risk between productive and allocative efficiency. The striking policy implication of this paper would be that the current trend towards a greater resort to contracts where private providers bear little or no demand risk may not be optimal. I apply these results to understanding three famous case studies

Cultural Biases in Public Service Delivery : Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity Approach

What determines the share of public employment, at a given size of the State, in countries of similar levels of economic development? While the theoretical and empirical literature on this issue has mostly considered technical dimensions (efficiency and political considerations), this paper emphasizes the role of culture and quantifies it. We build a representative database for contracting choices of municipalities in Switzerland and exploit the discontinuity at the Swiss language border at identical actual set of policies and institutions to analyze the causal effect of culture on the choice of how public services are provided. We find that French-speaking border municipalities are 50% less likely to contract with the private sector than their German-speaking adjacent municipalities. Technical dimensions are much smaller by comparison. This result points out that culture is a source of a potential bias that distorts the optimal choice for public service delivery. Systematic differences in the level of confidence in public administration and private companies potentially explain this discrepancy in private sector participation in public services provision

Common Good Institutions, Identity in the Workplace, and Value Dynamics

The theory of social choice stresses that the general interest determined through the aggregation of individual preferences implies interpersonal utility comparisons and hence necessarily a notion of common good beyond individual preferences. The pursuit of the common good falls to all services of the state and drives their individual decisions. Economic model of identity in the workplace predicts that outsider public sector workers may internalize the common good value to minimize cognitive dissonance. To test this hypothesis, I study the dynamics of preferences for workers in public versus private sector jobs. For identification, I use panel data and exploit within-individual variations, alleviating endogeneity concern related to selection into occupation. Further addressing the dynamic self-selection concern, I find that, for any given public sector, switching into the public sector increases by 15% the likelihood of exhibiting the common good value while having a negative effect on left-wing ideology and public trust. By contrast, switching into the private sector crowds out common good value. Examining causal mechanisms, I show that the public sector effect is most pronounced for workers facing higher dissonance costs. Furthermore, I find that workers adopting the common good value in the workplace adopt a general behavior consistent with active participation in the public realm, pointing to value internalization. Overall, this paper highlights how investing in factual public sector’s common good pursuit narrative can have broader and rapid implications for the prevalence of common good value in the society

Make or Buy for Public Services: Culture Matters for Efficiency Considerations

What determines the share of public employment in countries of similar levels of economic development, at a given size of the State? A standard answer from the public choice literature points to non-benevolent states, emphasizing the importance of constraints on their power. This paper challenges this view by investigating the role of culture and examining whether the relative cost-efficiency of public versus private provision varies across cultures. We build a representative database for contracting choices of municipalities in Switzerland and exploit the discontinuity at the Swiss language border at identical actual set of policies and institutions to analyze the causal effect of culture on the choice of how public services are provided. We find that French-speaking border municipalities are 60% less likely to contract with the private sector than their adjacent German-speaking counterparts. Technical dimensions are much smaller by comparison and their effects do not vary with culture, ruling out cultural bias in municipality choices. We further document that public provision, compared to private provision, increases cost-efficiency within French-speaking Swiss municipalities. These results resonate with the literature emphasizing that public bureaucracies are mission-oriented organizations whose organizational efficiency is enhanced through mission matching, but they also unveil that this mission matching is culturally determined

Transforming peasant lives, livelihoods and landscapes: an analysis of agroecological transitions in Northeast Brazil

This thesis explores the potential of agroecological transitions to transform peasant lives and livelihoods, emancipate the rural poor and reconfigure government policies in order to support agroecological transitions in northeast Brazil. In this work, agroecological transitions are understood as processes of transformation that seek to address the ecological, as well as the socioeconomic and political challenges of peasant agriculture, and support peasants in their historical struggles for emancipation and rural change. Integrating a livelihood analysis, with a discussion on emancipatory rural politics and a multilevel perspective, the work uniquely assesses the transformative, emancipatory and evolutionary process shaping agroecological transitions. The four empirical chapters focus on different phases of the transition process. They begin in Chapter 4 with a political economy analysis of agrarian change, peasant marginalisation and rural resistance, follow in Chapter 5 with a livelihood analysis of agroecological grassroots innovations (focusing in Pernambuco, Brazil), continue in Chapter 6 with an analysis of the development of agroecology into a social and political movement for peasant emancipation, and finish in Chapter 7 with a multilevel perspective of the co-evolutionary processes leading to the institutionalisation of agroecology into national politics. The chapters are framed around three common questions, namely how agroecological transitions transformed peasant lives and livelihoods in Pernambuco, to what extent and in what ways they supported peasant emancipation, and why transitions unfolded the way they did. Drawing on different sources of data (semi-structured interviews, farmers surveys, observations, and scientific and grey literatures), the analyses presented in this thesis demonstrate that agroecological transitions have transformed not only the lives and livelihoods of many peasant communities in Pernambuco, Northeast Brazil, but also created a social and political movement for peasant emancipation and rural change and began to reconfigure institutional frameworks to support the mainstreaming of agroecology. This thesis situated the emergence and development of agroecological innovations in a broader historical, social and political context of agrarian change and peasant marginalisation. This historical perspective was essential to understanding the contribution of agroecology to peasant emancipation and rural change. The livelihood analysis also revealed that advancing innovative practices and technologies, as well as empowering local communities and challenging conventional knowledge systems were important steps in a transformative process to improve peasant livelihoods and well-being and enhance farm agrobiodiversity and resilience. While situating transitions within theoretical discussions on emancipatory politics, the work demonstrated how the agroecology movement embraced historical peasant struggles for autonomy and contributed to strengthening the links across practices, science, social movement and policies. The thesis demonstrates how grassroots organisations increasingly organized around local, regional and national level networks and created a national agroecology movement to demand governments support in nurturing endogenous processes of innovation and improving peasants’ access to key livelihood resources. The multilevel analysis revealed how this movement took advantage of a policy opening at the national level and translated lessons from successful experiences into innovative policies. A reconfiguration pattern unfolded as a result of competing and collaborative interactions between grassroots innovations, network dynamics, landscape trends and regime structures. However, the analysis also pointed to some governance dilemmas and institutional constraints that limited the capacity of policies to support the mainstreaming of agroecology. It also raises some questions about the challenges and uncertainties moving forward as agroecology faces a new wave of authoritarian politics and policy retrenchment. This challenging moment reflects clear conflicts between transformative grassroots innovations and conforming regime forces and reinforces the idea that power shifts are key conditions in transition processes of translating and mainstreaming innovations. This thesis contributes to knowledge by providing a conceptually and empirically informed framework to analyse the transformative and emancipatory potential of agroecological transitions, and to identifying and discussing the challenges to mainstreaming agroecology as a transformative approach to peasant emancipation and rural change. At the same time, it contributes to the methodological and conceptual developments that are still needed to study and support agroecological transitions as a policy project, by uniquely integrating livelihood, political and multilevel approaches. In addition, the work corroborates a wide body of literature that indicates the potential of agroecology to transform peasant lives and livelihoods, emancipate the rural poor and potentially reorienting agricultural and rural development trajectories, particularly in the developing world.Open Acces

Selecting a global optimization method to estimate the oceanic particle cycling rate constants

The objective is to select an inverse method to estimate the parameters of a dynamical model of the oceanic particle cycling from in situ data. Estimating the parameters of a dynamical model is a nonlinear inverse problem, even in the case of linear dynamics. Generally, biogeochemical models are characterized by complex nonlinear dynamics and by a high sensitivity to their parameters. This makes the parameter estimation problem strongly nonlinear. We show that an approach based on a linearization around an a priori solution and on a gradient descent method is not appropriate given the complexity of the related cost functions and our poor a priori knowledge of the parameters. Global Optimization Algorithms (GOAs) appear as better candidates. We present a comparison of a deterministic (TRUST), and two stochastic (simulated annealing and genetic algorithm) GOAs. From an exact model integration, a synthetic data set is generated which mimics the space-time sampling of a reference campaign. Simulated optimizations of two to the eight model parameters are performed. The parameter realistic ranges of values are the only available a priori information. The results and the behavior of the GOAs are analyzed in details. The three GOAs can recover at least two parameters. However, the gradient requirement of deterministic methods proves a serious drawback. Moreover, the complexity of the TRUST makes the estimation of more than two parameters hardly conceivable. The genetic algorithm quickly converges toward the eight parameter solution, whereas the simulated annealing is trapped by a local minimum. Generally, the genetic algorithm is less computationally expensive, swifter to converge, and has more robust procedural parameters than the simulated annealing

Political accountability, incentives, and Contractual design of public private partnerships

Service adaptations, when there is changing demand or problems regarding the service provision, constitute a major issue in Public Private Partnerships (PPPs). So far, studies have explained the ex post adaptation problems by the distorted incentives for the private public-service provider to invest in adaptation efforts. However, as any PPP is between a public authority and a private public-service provider (no market price), public authorities have also an important role to play in the adaptation of the private public-service provision over time. This paper studies how the contractual design of PPPs affects accountability and incentives for contractually unanticipated service adaptations. More specifically, we observe worldwide two main different contracting out procedures: the concession contract and the availability contract. The main difference between these two contractual practices concerns the demand risk, which is borne by private providers in the first case and by public authorities in the second case. This paper shows that there are two main effects of the contractual design on accountability. (1) Concession contracts, compared to availability contracts, motivate more public authorities from investigating and responding to public demands. This is due to the fact that under a concession contract consumers are empowered, i.e. have the possibility to oust the private provider, which provides public authorities with more credibility in side-trading. (2) Concession contracts can give greater adaptation effort incentives to private providers than availability contracts, since, if private providers bear the demand risk, they can receive private gains from implementing the adaptation. The striking policy implication of this paper is then that the trend towards a greater resort to contracts where private providers bear little or no demand risk may not be optimal in terms of allocative efficiency