Total private investment in infrastructure, in both primary and secondary markets, has increased at 5% compounded annual growth rate over the past decade. However, this increase has been driven by secondary market transactions, i.e. the trading of existing infrastructure investments, which accounted for 75% of all private infrastructure financing in 2019.
Worldwide primary market transactions, i.e., new security offerings in either greenfield or brownfield infrastructure projects, have seen a decline, dropping from $156 billion in 2010 to $106 billion in 2019, or around 0.13% of global GDP.
Primary market transactions are an important metric for private capital mobilisation as they normally represent an incremental investment in infrastructure, which is typically not the case for secondary market transactions.
