During the last few decades, the European Union has been promoting the use of PPPs in order to accelerate the development of the TENT for ensuring economic, social and territorial cohesion and increasing accessibility within the EU. To that end, several mechanisms have been put at the disposal of the Member States to enhance transport infrastructure of interest for the EU. This paper conducts a review of the main funding programs implemented by the EU authorities in order to evaluate to what extent the European support has been rightly channelled to PPP projects. To that end, a multiple regression model has been applied to road PPP projects in Spain to analyse whether those PPP projects with EU financial backing ultimately have a higher economic performance compared to those projects not receiving such a support. The research concludes that there is a positive correlation between receiving European financial support and the good economic performance of those projects.

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The EU infrastructure policy has relied on Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) as a means to successfully deliver infrastructure of benefit for the EU. To reach its infrastructure policy objectives, the EU has implemented support mechanisms aimed at facilitating the delivery of PPPs. This article is aimed at evaluating to what extent these mechanisms have actually contributed to improving the economic performance of PPPs. To that end, we have selected the case of Spanish road PPPs for empirical analysis. The main result shows that EU support positively influences the economic performance of PPP projects. This is caused by the fact that the EU conditions its financial support on a project’s meeting a set of requirements that help assure the success of the project. From this result, we obtain a set of conclusions that may be generalised to other cases, and provide a contribution to the body of knowledge on PPPs.

Budgetary constraints are prompting many governments to encourage private financing of transport infrastructure through public–private partnerships (PPPs). Fiscal support measures are often used to improve the financial feasibility of PPPs and to rebalance the economics of contracts to compensate for government-imposed changes. In the latter case, information asymmetry, political haste, and lack of competition may lead to poor government decisions in establishing support measures. Furthermore, lack of government support may lead to early termination of contracts and non-implementation of projects with high potential social benefits. This paper analyzes the awarding of subordinated public participation loans (SPPLs) to 10 brownfield shadow-toll highway PPPs in Spain after the government imposed additional works. It is hypothesized that, given the political importance of the projects and the viability problems they soon experienced, the government may not have set out the terms of SPPLs efficiently. This paper evaluates the financial and social impacts of awarding these loans to three of these projects to assess whether the government’s decision to support them was justified from a sustainable perspective. The results show that, while the government’s decision was reasonable, the design of the SPPL and its awarding conditions should be improved to ensure the public interest.

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