اندازه گیری اثرات هم افزایی یک پروژه مشارکت خصوصی اجتماعی عمومی(PSPP)

This article applies the Cobb/Douglas production function to measure synergy effects of a Public Social Private Partnership (PSPP) project. Following a short overview of the literature on Public Private Partnership and in particular on Public Social Private Partnership the microeconomic approach of the Cobb/Douglas production function is presented which can be interpreted in this context as a generalised Nash solution of cooperative games and opens up the possibility of allocating the synergy effects to the partners of a PSPP project. The Cobb/Douglas production function is at first briefly analysed with regard to its assumptions, implications and consequences, and then applied to the PSPP project Anschub.de that was initiated by the Bertelsmann Stiftung. The empirical analysis uses real data and is based on a survey on the project cooperation partners whereby the resources and budget contributions spent are investigated. With the help of these budget contributions it is possible to determine relative success variables or synergy effects for the partners.

Public Social Private Partnership (PSPP) projects are understood here in the way that public institutions, private sector companies, foundations and private individuals jointly implement a project that increases welfare and is socially oriented. It is not directed at making a profit. Supports for kindergartens, schools or universities are prominent examples of this type of project. In general, the costs of PSPP projects can be easily measured through the monetary evaluation of the expended resources. In contrast, there is a problem as to how the social welfare effects of these projects are to be measured, because they do not lead to any directly measurable profits. Private participating partners regard their cooperation in the sense that in this way they are contributing to social stability and solidarity (Wettenhall, 2003). In addition, they help to provide goods or services, such as education or security, which the public partners, or the state, can no longer guarantee by themselves (Hearne, 2009). However, the inclusion of the technical competence of the private sector or of non-government organisations promises an additional synergy effect on the increase of welfare, which is to be developed consciously through cooperation in PSPP projects. The present article initially discusses some fundamental aspects of PSPP projects in Section 2. It then turns in Section 3 to the methodological procedure of how to record the welfare effects of PSPP projects quantitatively by the Cobb/Douglas production function, and how to assign those synergy effects to the partners that finance the project jointly. The production theoretic approach is then applied in Section 4 to the real project Anschub.de. Following a commentary on the findings of this empirical analysis the article concludes in Section 5 with a brief summary.

However, one question remains open: how can the absolute economic welfare contribution of the PSPP project Anschub.de be specified, in order to determine the corresponding absolute success variables that are directly attributable to the cooperation partners? A dynamic investment accounting approach would not make much sense in this context, because it is based on payment flows and insofar assumes that payment surpluses can be achieved as well through the project. The first general difficulty occurs here, whether such payment surpluses can be expected and actually calculated. Second, an attribution of their parts, and thus, logically, their payment, to the participating cooperation partners would not be realistic. Because the budget contributions are too different from the aspect of their emergence through the resources bundle for it to be possible to interpret them all equally as payouts of the Anschub.de investment project that can substantiate the corresponding monetary reimbursements. In addition, cooperation partners, to which higher payments accrue in comparison to their budget, would have to compensate those cooperation partners financially for which the circumstances are the reverse. Determining success through the effects of the economy's income multiplier is methodologically less acceptable. Two reasons militate against this. The increases in national income induced by the project investments accrue in part to persons for whose welfare increase the project was not intended (e.g., orders to printing companies for printing the materials). On the other hand, income effects do not occur with all persons who are intended to be the actual beneficiaries of the project and if they do, they are very difficult to assess monetarily. The third way of measuring success remains the assessment of the costs savings caused by the cooperation partners’ synergy effects in the framework of the PSPP that occur as against the situation in which the project would have to be financed solely through public funds. On the one hand, there are indications of this in studies in the literature, which report costs savings in similar projects almost in the two-digit percentage range. On the other hand, an attempt can be made by asking social politicians with due regard to the present data to find an answer to the question of how high they estimate these savings to be for Anschub.de, assuming that the effect intended with the project has been achieved. This path should be taken following the present study. However, there is a restriction here: because not all cooperation partners took part in the costs survey, the budget sums listed in Table 2, column 10 are probably much higher. In this sense, it is unsatisfactory that a systematic underestimation of the cost savings was carried out. However, allocating cost savings to the cooperation partners as synergy effects is probably the most motivating method of developing an existing project further, or of participating again in similar projects. This article has been successful in formulating a methodological approach that permits the synergy and success effects for PSPP projects to be determined and to allocate them to the cooperation partners. The approach is taken from production theory and may be understood as a generalised cooperative Nash solution. It is therefore suitable for describing the emergence and distribution as incurred of welfare benefits. This approach opens up the possibility of using it to determine the economic efficiency of PPP projects.