In the debate on the development of tangible and intangible infrastructures, an indispensable lever for the solid and sustainable growth of individual economies and of the Italian one in particular, the themes of public investments and the need to use public-private partnership instruments due to the scarcity of public resources are assuming ever greater importance.
This is certainly also one of the reasons why the publication, still hot off the press, by research on project financing, legal figure and tool to be used in the context mentioned above, to provide an effective response to the needs posed, both by the public interest and by the market in the context of infrastructure development.
The research, coordinated by Dominic Siclari, Professor of Economics and Financial Markets Law at the Sapienza University of Rome, makes use of the essays written by scholar collaborators of the Chair, as stimulating results of the research and training activity they carried out in the context of the Public Law Doctorate of the Economy.
As recalled in the introductory pages, the analysis of project financing is tackled on a legal level, without however neglecting the relevant economic implications for the country, "according to a method of economic analysis of law, which should constitute one of the modern methodological guidelines of law of the economy".
The reader is then led by the hand, with an irreproachable language on a scientific level but understandable even to non-experts, to initially address the aspects of public-private partnership and the role played by project financing.
Then, three other essays follow, dedicated respectively to: the international dimension of project financing and the related problematic complexities; the configuration of its market in Italy with a careful illustration and analysis of its components; and its regulation in the Code of Public Contracts, also in the light of the regulations concerning it contained in the Community Directive n.23 of 2014.
Finally, this research concludes with two insights dedicated to as many topics of no less importance. The first concerns the tendency to standardization of the project financing contract, a certainly appreciable trend with a view to improving the negotiating practices applied and increasing the diffusion of this tool. The second theme concerns, having ascertained the absence of a ad hoc judicial protection, both the interventions of the administrative judge in the selection phase of the project responding to the public interest, and those of the ordinary judge in the executive phase of the contract. Without neglecting the delicate profile of the division between the two jurisdictions with the relative problems to be resolved in the matter of granting the construction contract and subsequent management.
Ultimately, a book that constitutes a significant point of arrival in the treatment of this innovative and in some ways still unexplored subject. It is also a useful starting point for an even more aware debate and analysis, not only for specialists in the subject, but also for the choices of a sustainable economic policy of our country oriented towards solid development.
