A marriage of convenience

After a nearly decade-long wait, Lebanon’s legislature finally ratified a law encouraging private-sector investment in public infrastructure. The new framework for public-private partnerships (PPP) could allow the private sector to deliver some public services at lower prices than those currently available, says Peter Mousley, the program leader for trade and competitiveness, finance and markets, and PPP at the World Bank’s Beirut office. Lebanon’s commercial banks, Mousley says, have signaled their readiness to diversify away from mostly purchasing treasury bills, and an appetite for investing in public infrastructure. E   What’s the difference between privatizing public services and public-private partnerships? One way of looking at it is [that] privatization is a divorce and PPP is a marriage. They’re two very different things. One is where a government sells assets to the private sector; the other is where, under certain terms, a government makes assets available to the private sector to deliver