Infrastructure Investment – The Emergent PPP Equity Market

Increasingly governments are looking to private sector actors to invest in infrastructure projects. An emergent mechanism for such investment is the market in PPP equity. This is an aspect of PPPs that has to date had little empirical attention. This paper reports on the size and scope of the market in PPP equity sales within the UK. In the process, the nature of PPP projects and the existing rationales for the policy are critiqued. The paper concludes by laying out a number of potential research agendas focused on PPP equity sales including a call for reassessing theoretical perspectives.

Dexter Whitfield, Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia and Stewart Smyth, University of Sheffield, UK

Published in Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics