THE ECONOMICS OF INFRASTRUCTURE PROVISIONING

Infrastructure is an important activity both for business enterprises and government. Traditionally, infrastructure provisioning has been left to the government since it was perceived as a public good and, therefore, as having a free rider problem. Conventional wisdom indicated that such projects were unlikely to generate adequate revenue in the marketplace to offset the costs of their provisioning; thus funding and management of such projects have been relegated to government. However, over the years, questions have been raised regarding the effectiveness of government in provisioning and managing infrastructure projects. A decaying infrastructure of poor quality, combined with inadequate government funding, has compelled economists and managers from both the public and private sectors to re-think the provisioning of infrastructure projects. The initial reaction to this phenomenon among stakeholders has not been whether infrastructure should have public (government) provision or private financing, but whether a privately-financed investment in infrastructure should be made at all. Unsurprisingly, faced with these choices, governments have embraced private financing, resulting in the rise of public-private-partnerships to deal with the infrastructure question. PPPs, which solicit both funds and private sector expertise for infrastructure projects, have found many supporters in recent times, and governments have embraced them with open arms since such partnerships do governmenta€?s job without depending on government financing. However, nothing comes free, and PPP has its own drawbacks, the principal ones being a higher tariff on the user public and the limited capacity of government to handle PPP well. The book describes the characteristics of infrastructure projects, the inadequacies of making infrastructure exclusively a public concern, the rise of PPPs, and the economics of their pricing, investment and regulation.