Huangshan, China, October 25, 2004
—China’s Ministry of Finance and the International Finance Corporation, the private sector arm of the World Bank, are sponsoring the Public-Private Partnership Forum to encourage more private investment in urban infrastructure beginning today. The Public-Private Partnership Forum is a unique event for local governments, Chinese companies, and international partners to gather to talk about infrastructure investment needs and encourage more investment through increased cooperation between the government and private companies. The Forum has attracted nearly 300 international and domestic participants.
“Increasingly government officials and private executives are considering how they can work more closely to meet investment needs,” said Assistant Minister of Finance Zhang Shao, who will open the conference proceedings. On Sunday, October 24, an exhibition of projects from around the country will begin at the Huangshan International Hotel Conference Center. On Monday, October 25, a conference will take place for one and a half days consisting of keynote speeches and panels presentations from Chinese and global private infrastructure sponsors and government officials. The conference will continue in the morning of October 26, followed in the afternoon by private meetings between project sponsors and local governments concerning specific project opportunities.
“Around the world, a new business model is emerging in infrastructure. And that business model is what this Forum is all about: Public-private partnerships,” said IFC Executive Vice President Peter Woicke. In infrastructure, projects often make sense if they are privately run because of efficiency and the reduced burden to the government. In other cases, public run projects make the most sense because strong social benefits justify the large public expenditure. In many cases, however, projects will be best served by blended solutions of public and private participation. Participants in the Forum will discuss these new models of cooperation between the public and private sectors to maximize the benefits of private sector participation. The goal is to make it possible for the private sector to provide these critical infrastructure services on a sustainable basis, while working within the constraints of the realities of the marketplace and consumers’ ability to pay.
The Forum aims to contribute to thinking about what types of public private partnerships make sense in China by getting the key players thinking creatively about the challenges ahead and working to find new solutions that will help to ensure that the people of China, and of other countries, are provided with access to clean water, and improved services in the areas of gas distribution, solid waste, and transportation, on a sustainable basis. With dozens of projects on exhibition at the Forum combined with high level discussion at the conference proceedings, parties will be able to consider how structure projects in need of finance according to the new public private partnership framework.
