Learning from experience to improve future infrastructure public-private partnerships is a focal issue for policy makers, financiers, implementers, and private sector stakeholders. An extensive body of case studies and “lessons learned” aims to improve the likelihood of success and attempts to avoid future contract failures across sectors and geographies. This paper examines whether countries do, indeed, learn from experience to improve the probability of success of public-private partnerships at the national level. The purview of the paper is not to diagnose learning across all aspects of public-private partnerships globally, but rather to focus on whether experience has an effect on the most extreme cases of public-private partnership contract failure, premature contract cancellation. The analysis utilizes mixed-effects probit regression combined with spline models to test empirically whether general public-private partnership experience has an impact on reducing the chances of contract cancellation for future projects. The results confirm what the market intuitively knows, that is, that public-private partnership experience reduces the likelihood of contract cancellation. But the results also provide a perhaps less intuitive finding: the benefits of learning are typically concentrated in the first few public-private partnership deals. Moreover, the results show that the probability of cancellation varies across sectors and suggests the relative complexity of water public-private partnerships compared with energy and transport projects. An estimated $1.5 billion per year could have been saved with interventions and support to reduce cancellations in less experienced countries (those with fewer than 23 prior public-private partnerships).

The provision of infrastructure and related services in developing Asia via public–private partnership (PPP) increased rapidly during the late 1990s. Theoretical arguments support the potential economic benefits of PPPs, but empirical evidence is thin. This paper develops a framework identifying channels through which economic gains can be derived from PPP arrangement. The framework helps derive an empirically tractable specification that examines how PPPs affect the aggregate economy. Empirical results suggest that increasing the ratio of PPP investment to GDP improves access to and quality of infrastructure services, and economic growth will potentially be higher. But this optimism is conditional, especially on the region’s efforts to further upgrade its technical and institutional capacity to handle complex PPP contracts.

This exploratory study aims to identify the main characteristics and relationships between artificial intelligence (AI) and broadband development in Asia and the Pacific. Broadband networks are the foundation and prerequisite for the development of AI. But what types of broadband networks would be conducive are not adequately discussed so far. Furthermore, in addition to broadband networks, other factors, such as income level, broadband quality, and investment, are expected to influence the uptake of AI in the region. The findings are synthesized into a set of policy recommendations at the end of the article, which highlights the need for regional cooperation through an initiative, such as the Asia-Pacific Information Superhighway (AP-IS). 

Over the past decade, Ontario has seen a renewal in efforts to stimulate economic growth by investing in infrastructures. In this paper, we analyze the impact of public infrastructure investment on economic performance in this province. We use a multivariate dynamic time series methodological approach, based on the use of vector autoregressive models to estimate the elasticities and marginal products of six different types of public infrastructure assets on private investment, employment and output. We find that all types of public investment crowd in private investment while investment in highways, roads, and bridges crowds out employment. We also find that all types of public investment, with the exception of highways, roads and bridges, have a positive effect on output. The relatively large range of results estimated for the impact of each of the different public infrastructure types suggests that a targeted approach to the design of infrastructure investment policy is required. Infrastructure investment in transit systems and health facilities display the highest returns for output and the largest effects on employment and labor productivity. In terms of the nature of the empirical results presented here it would be important to highlight the fact that investments in health infrastructures as well as investments in education infrastructures are of great relevance. This is a pattern consistent with the mounting international evidence on the importance of human capital for long term economic performance.

Infrastructure development is critical to delivering growth, reducing poverty and addressing broader development goals, as argued in the World Bank Report Transformation through Infrastructure (2012). This paper surveys the literature of the linkages between infrastructure investment and economic growth, discusses the role of infrastructure in the participation of global value chains and in supporting economic upgrades, highlights the challenges faced the least developed countries and provides policy recommendations. It suggests that addressing the bottlenecks in infrastructure is a necessary condition to provide a window of opportunity for an economy to develop following its comparative advantage. With the right conditions, good infrastructure can support an economy, particularly a less developed economy, to reap the benefit through the participation in the global value chains to upgrade the economic structure.