Partnership of power and business in the development of region’s infrastructure: problems and solutions

It is very important for the economy of our country to introduce modern forms of partnership between government and business to finance social and economic projects, since the state budget does not have enough funds to finance those industries that are traditionally in state ownership and state administration. These sectors include health care system, education, municipal and road management, various means of transport. At the same time, objects belonging to the sphere of infrastructure cannot go into private hands, that is, be privatized because of their social, economic, political and strategic importance. In order to try to resolve the issue of underfunding of strategically important spheres of the national economy, organizations are being established in Russia and abroad on the basis of public-private partnership to solve strategic tasks, primarily in the sphere of infrastructure. The urgency of the problem posed, the lack of experience in using the PPP (Public-Private Partnership) mechanism in the Russian economy, the lack of an appropriate institutional environment for the development of PPPs in the field of infrastructure determined the choice of the research object. Based on both the statistics of the PPP Development Center, from 2009 to 2016, the institutional environment for the development of PPP projects and analysis of best practices, the auhor identifies the main pr oblems that have a negative impact on the functioning of PPP projects in the infrastructure sector: the lack of a PPP development program in the documents of the strategic planning of the region; the imperfection of the legal framework for the implementation of PPP projects; the lack of trained specialists in the field of PPP; the lack of a systematic approach in encouraging private investors planning to implement PPP projects in the region’s priorit y infrastructure sectors. In order to solve the problems of PPP development in the region, measures have been developed to improve the organizational and economic mechanism to achieve the main objective of projects based on PPPs - to increase the public welfare of the population by uniting the resources of power and business, distributing responsibilities and risks, and maintaining control functions in partnership with the state. The results of the research can be used to develop a program for the formation of the institutional environment for PPP development by the executive authorities of the region.