Reaching the point where institutional investors, like pension funds and insurance companies, invest significant amounts of long-term capital, and particularly debt-like instruments, in infrastructure may still be years away. However, the initiatives of the G20 leading countries and a number of multilateral development banks (MDBs) in the past two months, together with an unprecedented mobilisation of infrastructure lending anticipated in 2015, when the Brics New Development Bank and China’s Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank start operations, will at least bring the goal of infrastructure as a new asset class nearer.
Take the World Bank’s Global Infrastructure Facility (GIF), launched during the World Bank’s annual meetings in Washington, DC, in October, for example. Here, governments, MDBs and export credit agencies act as funding and technical partners, and the heads of some of the world’s largest asset management, private equity, pension and insurance funds and commercial banks – among them Amundi, Macquarie, BlackRock, HSBC and Citibank – act as advisors.
