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 first installment appeared in the 2020 July-August issue of i3. The report with footnotes and references is available at www.georginderst.com or https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3556473.

Social infrastructure has endured a long period of neglect in most developed and emerging countries, with chronic underinvestment exposed by the coronavirus crisis 2020. Schools, hospitals and all sorts of public facilities are at the center of our lives. Nonetheless, surprisingly little is known about “the hardware” of social infrastructure, how it is financed, and even less so about future investment needs.

This study is the first systematic account of social infrastructure investment in a global perspective. It gives an overv