Despite the existence of a voluminous body of literature covering the impact of infrastructure public-private partnerships (PPPs) on public value within the context of Western countries, scant attention has been paid to this topic in the Middle East. Given that the region has hosted numerous PPP projects that were implemented even without the rudimentary legal and regulatory frameworks considered essential for such projects to succeed, a study of PPPs within that region would thus be particularly useful, since an unpacking of the success factors for PPPs in the Middle East can reveal important practical insights that will advance the knowledge of PPP success factors overall. This paper, therefore, explores the rehabilitation and expansion of Jordan’s Queen Alia International Airport via the PPP route. It finds that the factors contributing to the project’s successful implementation can be categorized into those on the macro level related to political support, and the micro level factors concerned with management of daily activities involved in the partnership between the public and private sectors.

Job satisfaction is a goal of every organization and human resources department. Many studies have shown the relationship between employee satisfaction as a predictive factor for a variety of key organizational indicators such as employee commitment, employee engagement, productivity, attrition, and turnover. Engaging in well-being activities is one strategy that companies can use to boost employee satisfaction. The term “well-being” activities in Hebrew is a bit different from the common use of the word in the literature. It is a combination of the concepts of Fun Activities, Employee Experience and Perks and Benefits. In High-tech companies, there are many activities aimed at creating a positive employee experience and an attractive organizational culture. These activities include a vast range of activities such as: department events, happy hours, company events, holiday gifts, enrichment activities, sports classes (for example, yoga), and more benefits. Despite the considerable investment in this budget, there are not many studies illustrating the contribution of well-being activities to employee satisfaction and their ROI. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between workplace well-being activities and job satisfaction in the Israeli high-tech market. The hypothesis of this study was that there is a positive relationship between well-being activities in the workplace and satisfaction in the workplace, but also to identify which issues within the well-being policy will predict the highest level of employee satisfaction. The study was conducted among 91 employees from a variety of high-tech companies in the Israeli market. The study’s findings supported the hypothesis. Practical suggestions for organizations for the successful implementation of well-being policies are discussed.

Learning from experience to improve future infrastructure public-private partnerships is a focal issue for policy makers, financiers, implementers, and private sector stakeholders. An extensive body of case studies and “lessons learned” aims to improve the likelihood of success and attempts to avoid future contract failures across sectors and geographies. This paper examines whether countries do, indeed, learn from experience to improve the probability of success of public-private partnerships at the national level. The purview of the paper is not to diagnose learning across all aspects of public-private partnerships globally, but rather to focus on whether experience has an effect on the most extreme cases of public-private partnership contract failure, premature contract cancellation. The analysis utilizes mixed-effects probit regression combined with spline models to test empirically whether general public-private partnership experience has an impact on reducing the chances of contract cancellation for future projects. The results confirm what the market intuitively knows, that is, that public-private partnership experience reduces the likelihood of contract cancellation. But the results also provide a perhaps less intuitive finding: the benefits of learning are typically concentrated in the first few public-private partnership deals. Moreover, the results show that the probability of cancellation varies across sectors and suggests the relative complexity of water public-private partnerships compared with energy and transport projects. An estimated $1.5 billion per year could have been saved with interventions and support to reduce cancellations in less experienced countries (those with fewer than 23 prior public-private partnerships).