اجرای معیارهای کیفیت در مناقصه و تنظیم قراردادهای مدیریت زیرساخت

ABSTRACT Implementation of Quality Criteria in Tendering and Regulating Infrastructure Management Contracts

Economic theory demonstrates that, in perfect competition, the supply curve of a producing company matches up with its marginal cost curve. Consequently the market price, as determined by the intersection of the supply and demand curves, is equal to the marginal cost. For this reason, ideal markets provide their own guarantee of optimal efficiency (Varian 1999). This principle (also known as the “first fundamental theorem of welfare economy”) justifies Adam Smith’s intuition that ideal competition in the provision of goods and services is all that is required to achieve maximum social welfare (Smith 1904).

However, as some of the requirements for a situation of ideal competition are missing, market forces can produce inefficient or unfair results that can be corrected only by public sector intervention (Varian 1999). This scenario—often referred to as “market failure”—is the theoretical justification for the current regulation of public transport infrastructure (Gomez-Ibanez 2003). Nonetheless Demsetz (1968) has demonstrated the possibility of creating competition in the provision of goods and services with natural monopolistic characteristics through the introduction of carefully designed procurement processes. This allows private companies to provide public services in a competitive way.

This is the reason why, for several decades now, the public sector has progressively tended to transfer some productive tasks to the private sector, through contracting and franchising. For instance, Dunlop (1997) demonstrated how the implementation of maintenance contracts by the private sector in New Zealand resulted in important savings for the overall society.

As a consequence of this experience, contracting out has boomed in the last decades as a way of introducing the private sector into the management of public infrastructure. Competition in terms of price has traditionally been established as the key variable in the awarding of those contracts, whereas quality has traditionally been imposed only in one way: as established through a minimum requirement imposed on all bidders. Al-though some authors, such as Muren (2000) and Hensher and Stanley (2003), have studied the implementation of performed quality standards in providing bus services, they did not study the implication of those contracts for the management of infrastructure, nor did they evaluate the incorporation of those standards into the procurement process.

This paper analyzes the possibility of incorporating quality as a key variable, along with price, in awarding infrastructure management contracts. This paper consists of three parts: an analysis of the state of the art regarding the implementation of quality standards in infrastructure contracts, a theoretical analysis to define a new way of procuring and regulating contracts involving infrastructure management based on both economic and quality issues, and an evaluation of the feasibility of implementing a verifiable index. The theoretical analysis of this paper is developed in three distinct steps: first, the definition of an approach intended to measure the optimal net social benefit in terms of quality; second, the identification of the requirements to reach this optimal net social benefit; and third, the design of a procurement process for awarding of the contract in terms of both quality and price. As one of the key findings of the theoretical analysis is the need to establish a verifiable quality index, the second part of this paper shows, based on the practical example of contracts related to Chilean highways, that a verifiable quality index can be successfully implemented in practice. The most interesting result from this paper is that the use of quality, together with price as a means of procuring infrastructure management contracts, ultimately yields a higher net social benefit. This result is applicable not only to highways in Chile but also to any public infrastructure as long as a quality index to evaluate infrastructure quality can be implemented at a low cost.