Articles

In 2018, the City of Nice in southern France signed a 25 year contract with IDEX to design, finance, realise, operate, and maintain a heating and cooling network as well as to implement a smart grid for energy efficiency. IDEX is implementing this project in the 500,000m2 Nice Meridia district, which is home to office space, retail, leisure, housing, schools, and a hospital.

In March 2021, the Global Infrastructure Hub (GI Hub) and Infrastructure Australia hosted the inaugural International Forum of Infrastructure Bodies (I-Bodies). The golden thread running throughout the forum was the pivotal role I-Bodies play in either strategic planning for infrastructure or funding and financing infrastructure in their jurisdictions.

In this blog, Svetlana and Roberto discuss the major cross-border projects currently being planned and delivered with Russia’s involvement, and the importance of comprehensive quality assessment in delivering these projects. Their discussion practically illustrates several elements of successful cross-border project delivery that are detailed in the GI Hub’s cross-border reference guide, Connectivity Across Border.

The urgent need for resilient infrastructure is widely acknowledged as pressure mounts on governments around the world to drive a post-pandemic recovery that embodies the promise of ‘building back better.’ Today, we look at what the pandemic has shown us about resilience in infrastructure and what resilient infrastructure might look like in the future.

The Global Infrastructure Hub (GI Hub) strives to be an organisation where the different backgrounds and perspectives of our people contribute to diversity of thought and approach, enabling us to better live our values and achieve our mission. This diversity includes gender diversity with an awareness of our particular ability to bring attention to the need for gender equality and inclusion in infrastructure.

As stimulus spending ramps up, a ten-year trend study shows private investment in new infrastructure has declined since 2010.

Delivering quality infrastructure will increasingly become a key priority for governments globally, requiring substantial investment from both the public and the private sectors.

Transparency International Australia is launching a new project to identify the loopholes that enable corruption to thrive in the infrastructure sector in the Asia-Pacific region. The first step in this project is the development and testing of a new tool, to help understand corruption risks in transnational infrastructure projects in the Asia-Pacific region. The Infrastructure Corruption Risk Assessment Tool will help its users identify, assess and address corruption risks in the process of approving infrastructure projects. The global demand for infrastructure, and many governments’ eagerness to facilitate large volumes of infrastructure spending, means this tool comes at a critical time. Many countries, including the UK, Australia and France, as well as countries in the Asia-Pacific, have responded to the economic downturn caused by the coronavirus pandemic with commitments to boost infrastructure spending. While this increased funding is welcome, it comes with an increased risk of corruption.

Latin American and the Caribbean countries have a large, and increasing, infrastructure quantitative, qualitative and efficiency gap. The lack of sufficient physical assets, inadequate maintenance and poor service provision negatively impacts the quality of life of its population and the competitiveness of its economies.

Meet three women leaders who are transforming infrastructure development in Latin America.

Policy and regulatory implications of recent advances in the benchmarking of infrastructure investments.

From robust governance to leadership, discover why Singapore is a global leader in infrastructure.

Infrastructure projects are capital-intensive and emerging countries often rely on private investment to implement them. As projects generate revenues in local currency (usually escalated by local inflation), the mismatch between the revenues and the debt service in foreign currency represents a major risk. Without a reliable mechanism to properly mitigate the foreign exchange (FX) risk, relevant sources of potentially long-term and less expensive funding are not accessible. A deep assessment of the FX risk and the development of innovative mitigatory solutions is critical to amplify the offer of long-term credit facilities for infrastructure financing.

Institutional investors are facing growing calls for a stronger engagement in development, in particular for infrastructure, climate and social investments. The investment requirements for global sustainable development are huge. State budgets are already stretched in most emerging markets and developing countries (EMDE), with tax bases weakened and public debt piling up.

With signs of increasing international cooperation on climate change, including the Biden Administration’s commitment to halve America’s net greenhouse gas pollution by 2030, we may finally see new levels of momentum for transnational or cross-border renewable energy projects, which the United Nations has cited as required for the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal 7: Affordable and Clean Energy.

David Baxter discusses how climate change and COVID-19 reveals an urgent need for resilient infrastructure.

The benefits of infrastructure spending during an economic downturn for New Zealand are explored.

We look at some options for the US to effectively fund and facilitate the delivery of major infrastructure projects.