A direct comparison of the performance of public-private partnerships with that of traditional contracting

This paper assesses the city of Belo Horizonte's experience building school infrastructure through public-private partnerships (PPPs). Between 2009 and 2015, Belo Horizonte built very similar schools using both PPPs and traditional public contracting (TPC). As the choice of mode of contracting was unrelated to our outcomes of interest, the experience constitutes a quasi-experiment that allows for a simple and direct comparison of PPPs to TPC. We examine construction- and operation-phase outcomes measured using administrative data and a survey of school administrators. We find that schools constructed under the PPP contracting model outperformed those built using TPCs in most outcomes.