Search the Knowledge Hub

Latin American and the Caribbean (LAC) 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.   Over the last three decades public investment remains low at less than 2% of GDP, half of what East Asia invests in infrastructure per year. During the COVID-19 economic crisis, although the need for increasing public investment has grown this hasn’t translated into reality. Historically public investment will not increase because the region is characterized by a bias against infrastructure assets in favor of current expenditures during economic crises. Additionally, investment in infrastructure in LAC is perceived as a risky proposition in times of fiscal imbalances and debt growth. The average fiscal package to mitigate the impacts of COVID-19 was 8.5% of GDP and deficits increased by an average of 5.3% of GDP in 2020, propelling the public debt from 58% of GDP in 2019 to 72% in 2020 and it could continue to rise to 76% in 2023.  Preliminary estimates confirm that governments in LAC invested less than 1.5% of GDP in infrastructure in 2020, not a promising scenario for a major shift in public investment to close the regional infrastructure gap.

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

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

Bridging the US$15 trillion infrastructure gap has become crucial given the economic impact of COVID-19. GI Hub's Strategic Advisers deep-dive into a way forward to attract private capital.

The COVID-19 health crisis has highlighted the chronic underinvestment in social infrastructure around the world. Dr. Georg Inderst discusses Global Infrastructure Hub’s recently released Infrastructure Monitor 2020 report and what can be done to attract more public and private investors to social infrastructure.

An introduction to our new blog series on policy implications related to key data findings from Infrastructure Monitor.