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.
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