Local governments around mainland China initiated over 14,000 public–private partnership (PPP) projects with a total investment of 18 billion RMB in recent years, but nearly half have been withdrawn since the end of 2017, which raised wide concerns about whether PPP can contribute to the sustainable infrastructure development in urban China. In this study, we empirically investigated major factors affecting local governments’ PPP adoption, especially factors that led local governments to initiate inappropriate PPP projects. Based on a unique panel dataset of 286 Chinese cities between 2014 and 2017, the empirical findings suggested that local governments’ financial pressure was the most important factor and cities with higher off-budgetary debts or lower budgetary deficits tended to initiate more PPP projects. PPP projects initiated under off-budgetary burdens were more likely to be inappropriate and subsequently withdrawn. Based on the empirical results, we provide policy suggestions to promote sustainable PPP developments in China.

PPP withdrawal policy is helpful to reduce over-investment in PPPs leading to sustainable development. However, little is known about the role of local governments on over-investment in PPPs. Using the PPP Project Platform Data, a unique dataset, this article is able to quantify over-investment in PPPs by coding PPP withdrawal for the first time. This research tests the influencing factors of PPP withdrawal at the municipal level, according to the centralized withdrawal policy in late 2017 as an exogenous treatment. Based on the theory of over-investment to rapid economic growth, this study develops a two-pillar framework under the combination of political man and economic man assumptions to explain the PPP withdrawal of local governments. The results show that both official tenure and fiscal capacity are significant factors. In addition, debt partially mediates the mayor tenure on PPP withdrawal, and the land revenue growth can hinder the negative relationship between mayor tenure and PPP withdrawal. It implies that over-investment in PPPs is strongly influenced by official leaders’ personal promotion incentive and official group members’ collective benefit. Thus, our findings indicate that the centralized withdrawal policy is an effective instrument to prevent over-investment in PPPs. Moreover, a match should be formed between local development planning and investment plans to promote sustainable of PPP investment.

Under the new pattern of “double cycle”, promoting the quality development of railway infrastructure construction has become an important support point for the sound development of the economy and society. However, under the new pattern, there is still no accurate direction on how to build railway infrastructure under the background of double circulation to achieve better two-way development. Therefore, in this study, we collected relevant data on the railway track development status from 2012 to 2020, judged the current railway track industry development status through the compertz curve model, and established an index system to comprehensively evaluate the coupling degree of the railway track industry demand market, So as to get practical conclusions and provide directions for the development of the railway track industry.