Critical success factors for PPP infrastructure: perspective from Taiwan

Taiwan opened up international competitive bidding for its first public private partnership (PPP) project in Oct. 1996, the western corridor High Speed Rail (THSR) project, and the contract was signed in July 1998, which was the largest Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) project in the world at the time. Then, other PPP projects were launched for improving Taiwan's infrastructure. Based on the statistics provided by Taiwan Ministry of Finance (TMOF), Taiwan then conducted a total of 1217 PPP projects between 2002 and 2014. Many PPP projects are successful. However, studies on the critical success factors for Taiwan's PPP Projects are scant. The purpose of this paper is to present the findings which resulted from a study which aimed to identify & prioritize those factors critically contributing to the success of PPP infrastructure projects in Taiwan and to demonstrate the methodologies used. Four principal groups were extracted via factor analysis. They are: supportive legal frameworks, a favorable investment environment, selection of appropriate PPP projects and public support. Hopefully, the findings and the associated methodologies illustrated in this study can serve as references for successfully conducting PPP infrastructure projects in the future.