Remedies to the PPP Crisis in the Covid-19 Pandemic: Lessons from the 2008 Global Financial Crisis

The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered a global economic crisis and is leading multiple local, regional, and national governments to increase public debt to unprecedented levels. This situation endangers current and future road public-private partnership (PPP) programs, given their dependence on user fees and/or government availability payments. Accordingly, this study aims to explore recovery measures to address short- and long-term road PPP-related challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, by considering recuperation actions implemented during the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC). To do so, this research examines the PPP-crisis literature through the lens of social network analysis (SNA) and concepts linked to network modularity and community detection techniques. The analysis focuses on unraveling semantic relationships between PPP-related keywords in order to understand lessons learned from the GFC and to propose suitable remedies for overcoming the consequences of the global economic crisis derived from the COVID-19 pandemic. Findings show that the PPP-crisis literature forms a comprehensive self-contained interwoven network that can be organized into five semantic communities according to concepts related to risk, financing, governance, procurement, and institutional environment. Based on such communities, the analysis suggests five recovery measures and highlights two implementation challenges (i.e., global supply chain disruptions and quantitative easing policies). Future research is required to examine effective ways to apply the proposed PPP remedies in the long-term.