• accountability
• public-choice
• public-good
• public-private-partnership

Public good provision has always been a central role of government, but it is also an important element in political competition. The recent financial difficulties of public authorities have undermined their capacity to invest in public goods, requiring politicians to search for new ways to finance those investments.
A solution widely adopted is the Public-Private Partnership, an instrument designed to provide more valuable public goods thanks to efficiency gains coming from bundling building and operating phases in a single contract, but that has often resulted in resounding failures. The most common explanation for this lack of results is that PPP are often adopted not for efficiency purposes but to avoid financial constraints.
We build a model to analyze the incentives for politicians to use PPP for pork barrel politics in presence of a binding budget constraint, when they have a better ability to look forward than their voters, and are limited in their possibility to stay in charge. We then release the assumption of homogeneous income among voters, and analyze how this modifies politician’s incentives to pander.