Sustainable Location Selection for Investing in Public–Private Partnership Infrastructure Projects: From a Developing Country’s Perspective

Abstract

Location selection is one of the most important aspects of feasibility studies in all types of businesses and construction fields. However, poor project location selection is one of the leading causes of project failure, adversely affecting the cost, schedule, and other benefits of investors. This paper proposes an evaluation framework for selecting a sustainable location for investing in public–private partnership (PPP) infrastructure projects in Vietnam. Nine success criteria are identified via a literature review and expert judgments. Then, the fuzzy technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) method is applied to compute the success index and rank three alternatives: Southern (A1), Northern (A2), and Mekong Delta (A3) regions. Finally, a sensitivity analysis is conducted to examine the certainty and effectiveness of the model. The result indicates that alternative A1 is the best location for investing in the PPP form with a closeness coefficient (CCi) value of 0.555 and a sensitivity ratio of 11/13. This finding obtained using the proposed framework may be a helpful reference for practitioners and investors in selecting a sustainable location for PPP investment in Vietnam as well as other developing countries.