BACKGROUND |
With the last financial crisis, defence budgets have been experiencing significant reductions. As a result, it has been necessary to find ways to optimize and maximize resources. Following the NATOs concept of Smart Defence that that encourages Allies to increase cooperation, it is expected that in the future there will be a robust increase of Public Private Partnerships (PPPs). PPP can be generally defined as collaborative arrangements between the government and one or more private parties and have proved to be very useful, mainly to the public sector as means to reduce costs, get access to better products, services, and technologies. In a PPP, there is mutual leveraging of each partners strengths, and the resulting synergy coupled with close cooperation allows all parties to effectively achieve common goals 1 . Put in another way, PPP may be defined as a cooperative venture between the public and private sectors, built on the expertise of each partner, that best meets clearly defined public needs through the appropriate allocation of resources, risks and rewards. It can occur in the form of privatization, outsourcing, intellectual property/research, financial arrangements, just to cite the most obvious. As reported in Use of Public-Private Partnerships to Meet Future Army Needs, PPPs can: -- boost its assets, reduce capital investments, reduce costs, or reduce expenditures in infrastructure, intellectual property, or financial arrangements -- add to the value of its property and other assets -- create new capabilities and or assets; -- influence technology to get equipment better suited for military needs, possibly at a lower cost -- improve readiness and posture -- result in additional revenue to finance projects of the Armed Forces interests Despite of the increasing common general understanding of the term PPP, their forms differ from country to country, subject to national laws and defence industrial policies.
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