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The one-day Experts’ Meeting on future Global Infrastructure Needs took place at OECD Headquarters on 1st October 2004. It was organised by the OECD’s International Futures Programme (IFP), and brought together 45 high-level government officials and business executives involved in various infrastructure-related activities. Experts strongly encouraged the IFP to launch a major project on the theme so as to permit these issues to be addressed in more depth.

While the world’s infrastructure needs continue to grow, the resources required to finance such investments are failing to keep pace. The result will be a widening gap in the coming decades between necessary and actual levels of investment. In OECD countries there is tremendous pressure to replace, renew and maintain ageing infrastructures. Yet incidents such as the recent power shortages in North America, Italy and Sweden in fact look set to increase. In non-OECD countries, demographic developments combined with growing economic, social and environmental aspirations are likely to generate massive infrastructural needs in the areas of energy, water, transport and communications. But there have been significant declines recently in development aid as well as in foreign direct investment, and current modes of project financing such as build-operate-transfer (BOT) and concessions no longer appear to work successfully. So where will the money for these huge investments come from? Who will carry out the projects? What sort of new financing mechanisms will be required? Clearly, resolving the bottlenecks in raising the funds and implementing the projects will take innovative solutions.