The following article is an excerpt from a series of articles that will appear in i3 from the report by Georg Inderst Social Infrastructure Finance and Institutional Investors: A Global Perspective. The report with footnotes and references is available at www.georginderst.com or https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3556473.
After a long period of decay and neglect in many countries, policy makers are rediscovering the significance of good infrastructure for economic and social progress. At the same time, investing in infrastructure has become increasingly popular with institutional investors since the mid-2000s. The current, intensifying debates mostly focus on economic infrastructure, and the bulk of the money flows into transport assets such as airports or railways, energy networks and water utilities, and increasingly int