2016 Reports

From Global Savings Glut to Financing Infrastructure

Arezki, Rabah; Bolton, Patrick; Peters, Sanjay; Samama, Frédéric; Stiglitz, Joseph E.

This paper proposes an institutional solution that can help unlock the flow of low yielding longterm savings towards high-return infrastructure investments. The solution is to transform public-private partnerships in infrastructure and the classic model of multilateral development banks. Instead of thinking of public-private partnerships as bilateral contracts between a private concession operator and a government agency, we argue that they should be conceived as partnerships that also involve a development bank and long-term institutional investors as partners. We propose a new model for development banks, which is to transform themselves into originate-and-distribute banks for PPP infrastructure projects. This way they can conserve their valuable capital and leverage their expertise and capabilities by making them available to longterm institutional investors.