THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK ON PUBLIC PRIVATE PARTNERSHIP AND SERVICE CONCESSION ARRANGEMENT, BEFORE AND AFTER IFRIC 12 ADOPTION. RESEARCH TRAJECTORIES, LINES AND DYNAMIC DEVELOPMENT.

The present paper aims: (i) to achieve a consistent systematization of business and economic literature on Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) and Service Concession Arrangements (SCAs), in favour of the implementation and management of public assets granted to contractual entities (Foldvary, 1994, 2010), falling within the discipline of IFRIC 12, before and after its adoption by scholars from different countries; (ii) to analyze and systematize the clarification provided by IFRIC 12 (Laghi, 2010; Campra, 2012: 2675), in relation to service concession for concession operators providing a public service or public work, especially in Italy, by means of a “literature survey " also evaluating the bibliometric analysis from other studies (Capellaro, Cuccurullo, Marsilio, 2009, 2011). (iii) to determine to what extent IFRIC 12 helped to improve the order and to simplify the conceptual vagueness and chaos of definitions applying to the different forms of PPPs and SCAs. How much evidence does currently exist in the literature subsequent to the introduction of IFRIC 12. Will the analysis of the selected case studies proposed in this paper be able to get an answer to this question. IFRIC 12 gives guidance on the accounting by operators for Service Concession Arrangements (SCAs) between a public body and a private company, it does not specify the accounting by grantors, and provides for the concession assets, once verified some objective and subjective conditions (Laghi, 2010: 127), an alternative way to recognize them. In fact, infrastructure within the scope of this Interpretation shall not be recognised as property, plant and equipment of the operator because the contractual service arrangement does not convey the right to control the use of the public service infrastructure to the operator. Infrastructure shall not be recognized as material activity (highways, water supply, etc.), but as a right to charge users (intangible asset); or a right to receive consideration from the grantor for utilities paid (financial assets); or a mixed method, forked method (Campra, 2011). The proposed systematization of business literature, even in the presence of a weak and not systemic defense of the doctrine on the subject, would make it possible: a) to highlight in a systematic manner the weaknesses linked to the application of contractual PPPs and SCAs in Italy, detected by different scholars with regard to the adoption of IFRIC 12; b) to provide a starting point for future researches, identifying elements that are capable to predict crisis or scandal (Di Pietra, McLeay, Ronen, 2010; Di Pietra, Gebhardt, McLeay, Ronen, 2012), even through subsequent international comparisons by scholars from different countries (stone, 2000, 2002; Ronen, 2008; Dean, Gebhardt, 2008).