Four live infrastructure-finance cases a week, drawn from public reporting — each with one technical lesson and one constructive governance fix — tied together by a single fiscal through-line.
Published on LinkedIn every Tuesday as a carousel; each issue lives here as a readable page with its sources and the papers it draws on.
A PPP does not avoid public money. It schedules it: availability payments, capacity charges, a guarantee that pays when the project cannot. Firm or contingent, it is a commitment of the State — and much of it sits outside the figure finance ministries publish and markets read.
A power purchase agreement — and every water or transmission PPP built like one — has two signatures, and either can fail. The seller stops building. The buyer stops paying. What stands between that failure and the lenders — a guarantee, a pledge of receivables, a backup supplier — decides what the project costs. And the last layer is almost always the State.
Every power and water PPP is a bet on one signature: the buyer’s. Almost everywhere, that buyer is the State — or a utility the State will end up standing behind.
Money runs both ways between a government and the companies it owns, and the headline fiscal number sees only one direction. This fortnight: local vehicles that borrowed 90% of GDP on the State’s behalf. One-off dividends worth 4% of GDP that shrank a deficit. Ten years of unpaid electricity bills turned into a sovereign-guaranteed bond. And two rail companies whose debt service the Treasury has paid, line by line in the budget, for years.
Four official documents this month drew the line in four different places. Eurostat pulled €1.5 billion of military PPPs inside the government balance sheet. One budget carries the same programme at 96.6 billion in its risk chapter and 3,166.9 billion in its annex. One debt sustainability analysis stresses 14% of GDP of contingent liabilities with the PPP line at 0.0. And one debt limit was raised from 60% to 80% — and breached at 88.5%.
It is signed in one year and it lands in the accounts in another. This month three finance ministries published the gap. One shows a bill that is zero for two budgets and then 273 billion. One reports its PPP stock jumping 41% without signing a thing. In one, the bill arrived — and the State recovered under seven cents on the real.
A fiscal rule binds on what it measures. This fortnight four official documents showed what escapes the measure: a country’s biggest project, outside the fiscal risk statement. Two mega projects voted out of the perimeter by parliament. A claims stock that tripled in five years and lives in a parliamentary report. And the nine in ten low-income countries that publish no PPP exposure at all.
Four governments just did four different things with the same asset — a future stream of user revenue. One sold it forward. One auctioned it away by design. One wrote down that it might not arrive. In the fourth it already didn’t, and 31% of the financing landed on the budget.
Governments are enlarging the space PPPs are allowed to occupy — a doubled fiscal ceiling in one country, a State funding 70% of a “private” partnership in another — while private money arrives at a post-COVID record.
Four countries this week, one thread: infrastructure frameworks quietly decide who keeps the revenue and who carries the risk — and the budget counts neither until it fires.
Across four continents this fortnight, the same pattern: the real fiscal risk isn’t on the headline balance sheet — it’s in the commitments, guarantees, overruns and state-owned enterprises the framework doesn’t see.
Seventeen open-access papers on the fiscal risks of PPPs — the series every fix in the radar points to.
ResearchThe Price of a PPP