SOC 민간투자사업의 금융 조달 원활화 방안

A Study to Facilitate Financing PPI Projects

Since the overall amendment of the legal system for private participation in infrastructure (PPI) from the Act on Private Capital Inducement to the Act on Private Investment in 1999 after the financial crisis in 1997, the environment for the PPI system in Korea is in the process of improvement. This is wholly due to the effort of the public and the private sectors. Through the amendment, the Korean government aimed at amending the Act conformable to international standard in order to attract foreign investors for the construction and operation of the infrastructure facilities such as roads, tunnels, airports, and harbors, to name a few. In particular, the government changed the method of private investment in the infrastructure facilities project from a Regulatory System towards a Promotional System in three ways. The first is to refurbishing the frame of the infrastructure projects from a government-centered or government-fianced scheme to a private-sector-oriented or private-investment-initiated scheme. The second is to actively promote creativity and efficiency in the private sector throughout the stages of planning, designing, constructing, and operating the infrastructure project. The third is to introduce advanced management techniques and efficient operation systems by way of inducing foreign capital. However, it is generally agreed among the PPI experts and the practitioners that the performance of the PPI projects even after the amendment is far from their expectation and satisfaction made at the outset. In particular, the environment of financing the infrastructure facilities project is usually pointed out as the main reason for the blame, as there still remain some customary practices which make the private sector difficult in financing the project. The purpose of the current report is to criticize these customary practices and to recommend some measures to enhance the financiability of the private sector. This report consists of four chapters and one appendix, which contains a list of candidate PPI projects by categories during the period from 2002 to 2011 After the introductory chapter, chapter two firstly reviews the current situation of social overhead capital (SOC) investment and the PPI projects in Korea, and then presents a future forecast of PPI projects. Since the late 1990's, the government has consistently increased SOC investment in order to enhance national competitiveness. For the year 2002, the government's budget for SOC investment is almost 16 trillion wons, which is 75 percent increase compared to the previous year's budget. For the case of PPI projects, the number of the on-going projects such as roads, railroads, tunnels, and harbors under the management of the central government, where a total project cost exceeds two hundred billion wons in the amount, is 36, as the end of March, 2002. And, forty unsolicited PPI projects are currently under consideration of Private Infrastructure Investment Center of Korea (PICKO) on the basis of business proposals from the private sector, forty-five percent of which are environment-related projects such as basic environmental facilities, sewage (sludge) treatment plants, and recycling centers. According to a mid and long-term plan recently reported by the SOC-related governmental ministries, the annual amount of SOC investment required during the planning period from 2002 to 2011 is on the average forecasted to range between seventeen to twenty-two trillion wons And, the necessary private investment for infrastructure projects during the period is forecasted to range between twenty-eight to sixty trillion wons, including government subsidies Also, the industries presented a selective list of one hundred seventy-rune candidate PPI projects during the planning period, and their total project costs are estimated about sixty-three trillion wons. Chapter three is the main chapter of this report, which consists of two sections. The first sectio