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In recent years, the Taiwanese government has been active in producing various types of public infrastructure construction projects in an effort to promote public welfare. As public infrastructure projects generally require substantial monetary and resource expenditures, the government began to push for using methods of public private partnerships in order to incorporate funding and expertise from the private sector to achieve such projects. One of the forms of public private partnership is the Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) project type, where the quintessential principles involve the government entrusting the construction and operation of public projects to the private sector. Through operation of the projects, the private sector is afforded the ability to recover and even make profits that potentially grow beyond the initial costs and investments expended during construction. This potential, therefore, provides the private sector with incentive to properly monitor the quality of the project during the construction phase, which in turn lessens the burden of the government to maintain strict overseeing and quality control measures, since the private sector would be self-motivated to exercise necessary management procedures. However, public private partnerships in practice throughout Taiwan tend to suffer from problems such as poor construction quality, level of service during operation not meeting standards set in the contract, and private sectors undertaking changes to the project in favor of subsidiary businesses. Such issues contribute to the lack of success for BOT projects, calling into question the extent of public welfare actually generated from the projects. Such concerns prompt discussions as to whether the government has dutifully fulfilled the supervision role, as well as how much the government should actively supervise throughout the projects.
Through collection, organization, and analysis of relevant public private partnership laws, regulations, and model contracts, this study found that the issues stated above that occur during the construction phase of BOT projects may not necessarily be due to deficiencies in the laws, regulations, or quality control management measures themselves. Rather, problems tend to arise because the existing supervision management measures available tend to be underutilized or properly understood. This study focused on capability, process, and binding compulsion, as the three key factors for determining successful quality assurance. Furthermore, the study set to expound on how to best align the available existing supervision management measures associated with each key factor with specific preconditions of the main organizing party of a project. This would serve the purpose of allowing projects the potential to accomplish the ideal principles of the BOT method, where the government can achieve the goal of effective supervision of construction quality without the need for excessive intervention.
Key words: Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT), construction phase, quality control, role of the government
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