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The governments of Australia and the Republic of Korea recognize the importance of freight logistics in improving national competitive advantage. As they are seeking to capitalize on the economy-wide benefits to be derived from a world-class freight logistics industry, there is a need to keep abreast of their respective freight logistics policy initiatives as the basis for exploring prospects for mutual cooperation within the broader Asian-Pacific context. Attention here is focused on evaluating the Australian Government 's Freight Transport Logistics Industry Action Agenda to reflect on its relevance to the Korean Government ' s aspirations to become the Business Hub of Northeast Asia as envisioned in the Presidential Committee's Road Map for Promoting Northeast Asian Logistics Hub.

Since enacting Act 8630/93, Brazilian port activities have been going through significant modifications, changing from the public port service management to the landlord model. Act 12815/2013 enforced a new regulatory framework increasing Port Authorities' dependence on the Federal Government. Since 2019, the Government has attempted to elaborate a Port Authorities' identity based on the private port governance model inspired by the Australian and United Kingdom ones. This paper assesses Brazilian's Port Authorities management models from 1993 to 2020 and considers the Australian, the United Kingdom and Antwerp port governance models as benchmarks.

This paper adopts a two-step methodological approach, namely a combined desk and field research methodological approach and considers three essential resources: government legislative acts and published data available online; ports' data and information issued by governments' agencies, academic papers and national and international ports' websites; and a semi-structured questionnaire survey targeting the leading associations representing port users, foreign trade and stevedoring companies.

The outcome shows that the solutions to overcome the existing Brazilian Port Authority governance problems remain in the Federal Government's hands by (1) removing its control through bureaucracy, (2) preventing the party-political influence following in the public ports and (3) decentralising port management by chief executive officers named by Port Authority Councils.

This paper does not explore the regulatory frameworks underlying the “Lease Terminal” and “Private User Terminal”.

This paper assesses the management models that led Brazilian's Port Authorities from 1993 to 2020, comparing them with the UK and Australian private service port and Antwerp landlord model.

The unprecedented SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic has further constrained the budgets of governments worldwide for delivering their much-needed infrastructure. Consequently, public-private partnerships (PPPs), with the private sector's investment and ingenuity, would appear to be an increasingly popular alternative. Value for money (VfM) has become the major criterion for evaluating PPPs against the traditional public sector procurement and, however, is plagued with controversy. Hence, it is important that governments compare and contrast their practice with similar and disparate bodies to engender best practice. This paper, therefore, aims to understand governments' assessment context and provide a cross-continental comparison of their VfM assessment.

Faced with different domestic contexts (e.g. aging infrastructure, population growth, and competing demands on finance), governments tend to place different emphases when undertaking the VfM assessment. In line with the theory of boundary spanning, a cross-continental comparison is conducted between three of the most noticeable PPP markets (i.e. the United Kingdom, Australia and China) about their VfM assessment. The institutional level is interpreted by a social, economic and political framework, and the methodological level is elucidated through a qualitative and quantitative VfM assessment.

There are individual institutional characteristics that have shaped the way each country assesses VfM. For the methodological level, we identify that: (1) these global markets use a public sector comparator as the benchmark in VfM assessment; (2) ambiguous qualitative assessment is conducted only against PPPs to strengthen their policy development; (3) Australia's priority is in service provision whereas that of the UK and China is project finance and production; and (4) all markets are seeking an amelioration of existing controversial VfM assessments so that purported VfM relates to project lifecycles. As such, an option framework is proposed to make headway towards a sensible selection of infrastructure procurement approaches in the post COVID-19 era.

This study addresses a current void of enhancing the decision-making process for using PPPs within today's changing environment and then opens up an avenue for future empirical research to examine the option framework and ensuing VfM decisions. Practically, it presents a holistic VfM landscape for public sector procurers that aim to engage with PPPs for their infrastructure interventions.