Liability of Foreignness in Public-Private Partnership Projects
Publication: Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
Volume 149, Issue 9
Abstract
With an increasing number of multinational enterprises (MNEs) participating in public-private partnership (PPP) projects worldwide, the liability of foreignness in project construction and management become a manifested research topic in both academia and practice. This study aims to explore the impact of MNE participation on the survival of PPP projects. A unified theoretical framework with internal governance and external institutional environment is elaborated, and a dataset of 4,336 projects in 121 developing countries is derived from the World Bank database to empirically verify our hypotheses. The findings suggest that MNE participation has a detrimental impact on PPP project survival. Additionally, such detrimental impact is mitigated by the two dimensions (regulatory quality, and rule of law) and intensified by two other dimensions (political stability and absence of violence, and control of corruption) of the institutional conditions in the host country. This study contributes to the body of knowledge in two ways: (1) it is one of the pioneer studies that shed light on the liability of foreignness in the context of PPP projects and enhances our understanding of the MNEs’ impacts on infrastructure projects; and (2) it enriches the stream of research on project success/failure by linking MNE participation to project survival and revealing the contingencies of host country’s institutional conditions in the complex global market.
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Data Availability Statement
Data generated or analyzed during this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Acknowledgments
This study is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 72271153), the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Project of the Ministry of Education of China (Grant No. 20YJC630099), and the Soft Science Research Project of Shanghai Science and Technology Innovation Program (Grant No. 23692110900).
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Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
Volume 149 • Issue 9 • September 2023
Copyright
© 2023 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Nov 22, 2022
Accepted: May 15, 2023
Published online: Jul 7, 2023
Published in print: Sep 1, 2023
Discussion open until: Dec 7, 2023
ASCE Technical Topics:
- Business management
- Computing in civil engineering
- Construction engineering
- Construction management
- Databases
- Developing countries
- Engineering fundamentals
- Information Technology (IT)
- Legal affairs
- Liability
- Methodology (by type)
- Mitigation and remediation
- Practice and Profession
- Project management
- Public private partnership
- Research methods (by type)
- Verification
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