GLOBAL: Assessing Direct and Indirect Public Investment in Infrastructure in Low and Middle Income Countries

This report documents and analyzes the data collected on the state-owned enterprises (SOEs)/public projects (SPI data) and compares it to the Private Participation in Infrastructure (PPI) database data, in order to see the relative proportion of investment commitments made by the public, SOE and private sectors to infrastructure projects at the global, regional and sectoral levels in 2017. The aim is to give PPP practitioners a full understanding of the infrastructure investment picture, particularly on projects being sponsored by SOEs or those publicly funded through treasury budget.
 
The 2017 SPI and PPI data sets confirm that infrastructure development remains a public-sector ‘business’. Both project sponsorship (i.e., number of projects being implemented) and the volume of infrastructure project investments are overwhelmingly attributed to the public sector. While private participation plays an important role in offsetting financing shortfalls and injecting much-needed management and technical expertise into public services, particularly in the renewable energy sub-sector and ports sub-sector, the public sector continues to drive infrastructure investment and project implementation overall. Public sector investments, including investment by government entities and SOEs, accounted for 83 percent of the US$0.5 trillion of infrastructure project investment commitments in EMDEs in 2017. Private sources, on the other hand, accounted for only 17 percent of investments. Moreover, the number of projects with majority public sponsorship (SPI projects) far exceeded privately owned projects (PPI projects). In 2017, 1,806 new projects were wholly, or majority sponsored by the public sector, as compared to 305 PPI projects.