In January, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto stood before heads of state and business leaders from around the globe and declared 2014 as the year private companies would start investing in his country’s energy sector. Peña Nieto’s statement, made in such a global setting, represented a historic shift in Mexico’s energy policy.

The conventional wisdom tells us that defined contribution retirement plans are ill suited to invest in infrastructure — the sector lacks liquidity, requires too much capital and too much long-term planning. But how then could Australia, a nation with 90 percent of its pension assets in DC plans, have arguably the highest proportion of pension assets allocated to infrastructure worldwide (according to Pension Fund Investment in Infrastructure: A Comparison between Australia and Canada by OECD?

As everyone knows, the world needs a gazillion dollars (euros, pounds, krona, pesos, yen, etc.) in infrastructure development and redevelopment. To be more precise, the estimated shortfall in global infrastructure debt and equity investment is at least $1 trillion per year!