Over-charging and under-investment: is the model broken? Private investment in European roads is under fire once more. The typical charge against the ubiquitous motorway concessions crossing France, Italy or Spain is that, as quasi-monopolies, they have a nasty tendency to under-invest and over-charge. This assertion is taking on new meaning as road infrastructure ages, and lack of sufficient maintenance and...

There are big hurdles in place right now The industry needs to promote better standards, methods and benchmarking. That’s the only way to remove the hurdles that are preventing institutional capital from flowing into infrastructure. Institutional investors have become increasingly interested in infrastructure investment in recent years, in search for new sources of returns, diversification, duration and inflation hedging. However,...

Singapore, 10 April 2018 – A case study of 10 Spanish toll road projects shows that ill-designed procurement can lead to pro-cyclical infrastructure investment risk and significant losses for private investors. EDHEC Infrastructure Institute – an academic research organisation building performance benchmarks for investors in private infrastructure – shed new light on the risks encountered in infrastructure project investment with...

From ad hoc to world class Today infrastructure investors use ad hoc benchmarks for unlisted infrastructure investment. They know that’ snot good enough. At EDHECinfra, we are establishing an industry standard for the infrastructure asset class. And we’ve made significant process. We are establishing a framework for data collection and developing asset pricing techniques to measure the risk adjusted performance...

This blog was originally published on the World Bank’s PPP Blog Website. It’s past time for proper infrastructure benchmarks The Argentinian presidency of the G20 opens this month. All the signs indicate that it will be marked by a focus on infrastructure investment. Already, the G20 and OECD have announced a wide-scale data collection initiative for the purpose of creating...

Listed infrastructure, in its current form, cannot be called an asset class. Asset managers offering so called ‘infrastructure funds’ are misleading investors. It has been argued that the wrapper does not matter, but first impressions count. Our recent paper, The Rise of Fake Infra, reviewed the marketing material of 144 listed infrastructure products. That is, any listed fund with the...