The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) invested C$9.5 billion ($9.6 billion) in infrastructure during the latest quarter ending June 30, 2011.

The £5 billion ($8.2 billion) Merseyside Pension Fund has decided to allocate £20 million ($32.4 million) to Australian fund manager and infrastructure investor AMP Capital’s Strategic Infrastructure Trust of Europe.

Brazilian fund manager Pátria Investimentos has announced the close of its second infrastructure fund at $1.15 billion.

Investors choose infrastructure investments for a number of reasons: diversification, high yields and low correlations are a few of these. In addition, infrastructure can provide some protection against high inflation, and that’s very attractive to institutional investors; however, inflation-hedging promises have not always lived up to the hype, and investors seeking this benefit need to set expectations and choose the right assets.

In any election for higher office, creating jobs is a priority, but with a U.S. economy as sluggish as this one and weak job growth to boot, putting people to work has taken on an urgent focus. So it is not surprising that President Barack Obama recently has been touting the merits of a national infrastructure bank.

Most recently Clark co-authored The New Era of Infrastructure Investing with Ashby Monk, senior research associate at the University of Oxford, and Ryan Orr, executive director of the Collaboratory for Research on Global Projects at Stanford University. The report concludes that the infrastructure sector will continue to change in ways that better address the goals of institutional investors and that allow for the benefits of infrastructure investing to be more effectively realized. Clark recently spoke with Institutional Investing in Infrastructure assistant editor Tyson Freeman about infrastructure investing.