Demonstrates mediation of strategic planning alignment on cost performance in developing economies, suggesting important implications for governance reform.
Cost overruns in public infrastructure persist as a governance failure in developing economies, yet causal pathways linking public investment management (PIM) dimensions to cost performance (CP) remain underspecified. Drawing on Principal-Agent, Institutional, and Organisational Capability theories, this study tests a mediation model in which Strategic Planning Alignment (SPA) transmits the effects of Organisational Capacity and Implementation (OCI), Monitoring Control and Audit (MCA), and Inter-Agency Coordination (IAC) on CP. The central novelty is demonstrating empirically that PIM dimensions are causally ordered rather than additive __ SPA operates as a planning bottleneck through which all upstream management effects must pass, challenging the independent-dimension logic of leading diagnostic frameworks. A sequential mixed-methods design was employed: Phase 1 applied the Fuzzy Delphi Method with 15 Vietnamese public investment specialists to validate a 16-indicator instrument; Phase 2 tested the structural model via PLS-SEM (SmartPLS 3) on 179 professionals. All seven hypotheses were supported. SPA exerted the strongest direct effect on CP (β = 0.516) and fully mediated the effects of OCI (β = 0.514), MCA (β = 0.213), and IAC (β = 0.174). A robustness check confirmed full mediation empirically. The study contributes a validated project-level PIM instrument and reform-sequencing evidence for developing economies.
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Nguyen et al. (2026) studied this question.
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