The Statistical Treatment of Public-Private Partnership Assets
in the GFSM 2001 Framework

This study aims to contribute to providing guidance in the appropriate treatment of public-private partnership (PPP) assets within the Government Finance Statistics Manual (GFSM) 2001 framework. The study concludes that in PPPs where the government is the purchaser of the project outputs and it bears a substantial proportion of project risks, classifying the economic ownership under government would contribute to prudent fiscal management and debt sustainability analysis. Where before governments would recognize the future service payments as mainly expenditure on goods and services as spending accrues, they would now have to record acquisition of the PPP assets and recognize a significant portion of future payments as actual liabilities in the government balance sheet.