Determining Critical Success Factors for Public–Private Partnership Asset-Backed Securitization: A Structural Equation Modeling Approach

Public–private partnership (PPP) has been widely applied in China and many developing countries in the recent decade. As new PPP projects gradually enter the operational phase, the issue of refinancing becomes increasingly important. PPP–ABS plays an indispensable role in PPP project refinancing. The factors that promote the success of the emerging PPP–ABS in the China financial market need to be determined. To accomplish two objectives, namely, to identify critical success factors (CSFs) and to explore the relationship between these factors and the success of the PPP asset-backed securitization (PPP–ABS) of this research, methods such as a questionnaire survey and structural equation modeling (SEM) were conducted successively. Four success factors, including underlying asset quality (UAQ), original equity holder credit (OEHC), rationality of security design (RoSD) and maturity of relative institutions (MoRI), were identified in this study. Consequently, nineteen theoretical hypotheses were developed and tested. It is shown in the SEM approach that UAQ and OEHC positively influence the success of PPP–ABS, alongside issuance characteristics (IC) that mediate the relationship between the success of PPP–ABS and UAQ, RoSD and MoRI, respectively. This finding increased knowledge of PPP–ABS and how investors and government can benefit from it.