How better collaboration between the private and public sector can generate growth in Denmark

Population ageing and urbanization will result in more pressure on public financing in the coming years. A vital instrument to handle this development is to continue to develop the collaboration between the public and private sector in order to solve heavy investment projects. The collaboration between the public and private sector in Denmark is well-developed, and Denmark generally has had good experiences with the already established public-private partnerships.

The main conclusions of our study are:

• There is no clear-cut definition of a public-private partnership.
• A public-private partnership is driven for the purpose of attaining the best possible overall economy, quality and delivery certainty. This is made possible through distributing the right amount of risk on both the public and private sector actors, and at the same time make use of the innovation capacity in both sectors.
• Since the first project was agreed upon in 2004, 47 public-private partnership projects have been signed in Denmark.
• There are expected cost savings on both equipment and operation costs by putting up a project as a public-private partnership. For several of the projects, the total cost savings amounted to approximately 10%.
• There is still a big untapped investment potential of DKK 10-30b. per year in increasing the total amount of ’traditional’ public-private partnerships in Denmark.
• The study identifies a number of barriers to continuing the development of public-private partnerships in Denmark and outlines six concrete recommendations for going forward.

The study is commissioned by Axcelfuture

The full study is available for download in Danish