RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Brazil and Chile are the Latin American countries with the greatest capacity to mobilize private investment in infrastructure through public-private partnerships, according to a study sponsored by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).
The report, commissioned by the IDB and prepared every two years in conjunction with Economist Impact, the analysis unit of The Economist Group, stresses that Latin American and Caribbean countries have taken “significant steps” in creating enabling environments for the development of “efficient and sustainable” public-private cooperation in infrastructure.
Two countries stand out in particular, Brazil and Chile, and five more show “high performance”: Uruguay, Colombia, Peru, Panama, and Costa Rica, the IDB said in a statement.
According to its report, the focus should now be on improving project preparation, financing, and risk management; the regulatory and institutional foundations for investment development are “largely in place” throughout the region.
During the presentation of the study, IDB President Mauricio Claver-Carone pointed out that public-private partnerships represent a “great opportunity to expand markets, generate jobs and contribute to the region’s economic recovery and growth,” in addition to fostering sustainability, efficiency, and innovation.
He recalled that, for this reason, the IDB supports this type of collaboration.
The study also encourages countries to continue working to guarantee the financial quality and fiscal viability of the projects and considers that they should give more weight to sustainability so that the infrastructures resulting from these investments “stand the test of time and climate change”.
With information from EFE