Prioritizing the Barriers of Public-Private Partnerships Development in Transportation Sector of Iran Using MCDM Models

Public-Private Partnerships (PPP) models using the capacities of private sector have provided a background to supply public services and infrastructures in different ways. Transportation sector as a fundamental sector of economic development in Iran needs public-private participation models. For this purpose a theoretical literature of public-private partnerships has been reviewed and then the barriers to the development of such partnerships in transportation sector of Iran economic، infrastructure، legal and social areas were investigated. Finally with AHP، TOPSIS and SAW methods of Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) the barriers were prioritized and their relative importance was analyzed. The results of three methods indicate that factor of financial markets limitations and availability of financing is the main barrier to the development of public-private partnerships. Although there is a little different among the results of TOPSIS in rating some final factors compared to other two methods، by calculating rank correlation coefficient (Spearman) the null hypothesis (the lack of correlation between the results) was rejected and with 99. 75 percent probability all of the result are similar. Ranking results of barriers to the development of public-private partner ships in this study can be taken into consideration in policymaking and determining the requirement to use these models in the fields of transportation and other infrastructural areas.