Germany - Wittlich-Wengerohr Transformer Station

United Kingdom - London Crossrail

Ivory Coast - La Mé Water Tower

Denmark - Femern Tunnel

Alaska - Haines Highway

Norway - Grenland Bridge

Australia - Melbourne Port

Australia - Melbourne Metro Tunnel

News

Infrastructure Monitor 2022 : Global trends in private investment in infrastructure

February 2023
Global Infrastructure Hub (93 pages).

After remaining resilient overall through the initial shock of the pandemic in 2020, private investment in infrastructure projects in primary markets recovered in 2021 to just 0.3% below its 2019 level. This recovery was largely the result of growth in the regions hardest hit during the pandemic – Oceania, Latin America, and Asia – which all saw investment bounce back following steep regional declines in 2020.
However, the longer-term story of private investment in infrastructure is one of stagnation. Private investment in infrastructure projects in primary markets has been stagnant for eight years running and the USD172 billion invested in infrastructure projects by private investors in 2021 remains far shy of what is needed to close the infrastructure investment gap. Investment trends also differ among high-, middle-, and low-income countries, and the level of investment in middle- and low-income countries continues to decline.
In 2021, private investment in infrastructure projects grew by 8.3% in high-income countries, while investment in middle- and low-income countries fell by 8.8%. The gap between private investment in infrastructure projects in high-income countries and that in middle- and low-income countries continues to widen; in 2021, 80% of private investment in infrastructure projects occurred in high-income countries and 20% in middle- and low-income countries.
While the declining trend in infrastructure investment in middle- and low income countries began before the pandemic, it was exacerbated during the crisis, and investment levels remain significantly lower than those seen in high-income countries.
The renewables sector continues to attract the most investment, garnering almost half of total private investment in infrastructure projects in 2021. Meanwhile, the global trend away from non-renewables continued. Non-renewables now represent only 11% of total private investment in energy projects.
Encouragingly, following a trend that emerged during the pandemic in 2020, private investors are showing growing interest in telecommunications and social infrastructure, sectors that have historically attracted very low levels of private investment.

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EU construction sector suffers multiple setbacks

September 2022
ING (11 pages).

We expect low growth in the EU construction sector this year and next. The EU Construction Confidence Indicator is still positive but optimism is waning.

In June 2022, the EU's construction output was 2.3% lower than in February before the Ukraine war began. The difference in output between countries is huge. The Austrian and German construction sectors have experienced the biggest declines of -6.3% and -4.5%, respectively. Labour and material shortages are severe in these countries. In addition, German consumers are currently more reluctant to make home improvements than consumers in many other EU countries (see below). Austria has a lower number of building permits in 2021 which is likely to weigh on production this year and next. The Netherlands showed the smallest deterioration (-0.1%), however, compared to a year ago, Dutch contractor volumes still increased by a staggering 5.3%. Growth was especially high in the Dutch residential and commercial building sector. For Dutch civil engineering, the levels of nitrogen emissions in The Netherlands are still an issue.

On the other end of the spectrum, Poland’s construction sector showed the highest year-on-year growth in June (6.7%).

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Embracing technology and sustainability in freight transport - Août 2022

August 2022

Voices on Infrastructure, Mc Kinsey (41 pages).

Sommaire :

- Introduction

- News from the Global Infrastructure Initiative

- Disrupting transport: An interview with Robert Falck of Einride

- Unlocking hydrogen’s power for long-haul freight transport

- DHL on sustainable, customer-centric delivery in the last mile

- Mapping the way: Decarbonizing roads

- Managing capital risk in the race to net zero

- Roundtable recaps

* Hong Kong 2022: Surviving the productivity and inflation crisis

* Tokyo 2022: Navigating the new normal and decarbonization challenge in Japan’s infrastructure industry

* Sydney 2022: Scaling EV infrastructure to meet net-zero targets.

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Ukraine Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment - Août 2022

August 2022

Banque Mondiale (244 pages).

As of June 1, 2022, direct damage has reached over US$97 billion, with housing, transport, and commerce and industry being the most affected sectors. Damage is concentrated in the frontline oblasts (74 percent), particularly Donetska, Luhanska, Kharkivska, and Zaporizka, and in oblasts that were brought back under government control (22 percent) such as Kyivska and Chernihivska. Disruptions to economic flows and production, as well as additional expenses associated with the war, are collectively measured as losses and amount to some US$252 billion. Ukraine’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) shrank by 15.1 percent year over year in the first quarter of 2022, and poverty is expected to increase from 2 to 21 percent (based on the poverty line of US$5.5 per person per day).

Reconstruction and recovery needs, as of June 1, are estimated at about US$349 billion, which is more than 1.6 times the GDP of Ukraine in 2021. Integrated into these needs are critical steps toward becoming a modern, low-carbon, disaster- and climate-resilient, and inclusive country that is more closely aligned with European Union standards. While the financing envelope is overwhelming, experience from other countries shows that reconstruction spans many years and a phased approach to reconstruction is critical. The report also details some US$105 billion needed in the immediate and short term to address the most urgent needs, including social infrastructure (such as schools and hospitals, especially in areas brought back under government control), preparation for the upcoming winter through winterization and restoration of heating and energy to homes, urgent repairs, gas purchases, support to agriculture and social protection, and restoration of vital transport routes. These actions will lay the groundwork for a safe, prioritized, and efficient reconstruction and recovery.

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The 2021/22 Infrascope : Evaluating the environment for public-private partnerships in Latin America and the Caribbean - Juillet 2022

July 2022

Economist Impact pour le compte de la Banque Interaméricaine de Développement : rapport principal (54 pages) + résumé pays (57 pages) + méthodologie (149 pages).

Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Colombia, Peru, Panama and Costa Rica top the indicators in Infrascope 2021/2022, which evaluates the capacity of countries to mobilize private investment via public-private partnerships.

The Infrascope 2021-2022 study finds that Latin American and Caribbean countries have made major strides toward creating environments that favor the emergence of efficient and sustainable public-private partnerships (PPPs) for infrastructure.

Brazil and Chile especially stand out in this area, while Colombia, Peru, Panama and Costa Rica also show good performance.

In general, the region has already laid the regulatory and institutional foundations for developing PPPs, and countries should now focus on improving project preparation, funding, and risk management, the report says.

Infrascope 2021-2022 is the seventh edition in a series of studies conducted every two years by Economist Impact, the analysis arm of The Economist Group, and commissioned by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).

The new edition of the Infrascope was expanded to include all 26 borrowing member countries of the IDB and features a new indicator framework to reflect the latest developments in PPPs for infrastructure. These developments include social and environmental sustainability, fiscal control and budget planning, transparency and accountability, and new financial instruments.

The study found that creating environments to better enable the development and implementation of PPPs for infrastructure is crucial to enhancing the efficiency, sustainability, public-private balance and quality of this mechanism in the region.

The study also points out that to develop fiscally viable infrastructure PPPs that are of high financial quality, it is necessary to reduce uncertainty via transparent, consistent and efficient risk allocation, and by applying lessons learned through ongoing project-performance monitoring.

It also recommends that countries place more emphasis on sustainability and preparation for the future to ensure economic and social infrastructure will withstand the test of time and climate change.

Countries Summaries (7.24mo )
Methodology (2.34mo )
Report (2.62mo )

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Guidance on PPP Legal Frameworks - Juin 2022

July 2022

Banque Mondiale (148 pages).

This Guidance is intended to aid government officials inform themselves about and establish suitable PPP legal frameworks and sets out key considerations and sample drafting in relation to a number of critical provisions in publicprivate partnership (PPP) legislation and supporting instruments. The Guidance explains the background to these essential legislative provisions, while providing benchmarking examples from markets with different legal traditions and maturities, to highlight the need to cater to a government's specific set of circumstances. Designed as a succinct and digestible practitioner’s guide, the Guidance is not intended to cover every possible aspect of a PPP legal framework.

Neither is it a recommendation to opt for PPP as the delivery model for projects, nor an analysis of PPP’s advantages and disadvantages.

While PPP may be implemented on a one-off basis without any specific supporting legal and institutional framework, most countries with successful PPP programs rely on a sound enabling framework. These typically regulate the development and management of PPPs from upstream to downstream, anchoring PPP processes in the respective country’s overall public investment management framework and providing for clear assignment of institutional roles and responsibilities, implementation of appropriate project origination and appraisal processes and strong risk management throughout the PPP lifecycle.

Numerous emerging and nascent PPP markets have therefore made and are making efforts to adopt their own PPP legislation, and in doing so are looking for good practice to follow. While several international organizations have developed guidelines for good governance in PPPs regarding different types of infrastructure projects, specific knowledge products on drafting PPP legislation have been less numerous. Important recent examples include the UNCITRAL Legislative Guide on Public-Private Partnerships (2019) and accompanying Model Legislative Provisions on Public-Private Partnerships (2019), as well as the Draft UNECE-EBRD People-first PPP/Concession Model Law (at the time of writing not yet formally adopted).

It is against this background that the World Bank developed the Guidance as a practical tool for government officials to complement the global body of knowledge as regards the understanding and drafting of PPP legal frameworks. In focusing on selected key legal provisions, the Guidance particularly aims to address considerations related to the fiscal, environmental and social sustainability of PPP projects as well as their resilience/adaptability to external shocks such as natural disasters, climate change extreme weather events and crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

With respect to the sample drafting contained in the Guidance, the authors would like to emphasize that it is neither intended to be exhaustive nor prescriptive, but is provided as illustrative and a starting point for jurisdiction-specific drafting. Specifically, it is not meant to be mandatory for use in World Bank financed operations which may involve the review or reform of legal enabling environments for PPP. Instead, the contents of this Guidance should be regarded as one of many inputs for governments to consider when thinking of establishing or amending an existing PPP legal framework. It should equally be noted that references to country examples throughout the document should not be interpreted as World Bank endorsement of the respective country’s PPP framework/program or as recommended best practice. Rather, these examples are given for benchmarking purposes and to illustrate the drafting considerations explained in each chapter of the Guidance.

The authors would finally like to stress that this publication is seen as an evolving process. The intention is to develop further iterations of the Guidance as market practice around the key themes covered in this document (and any new areas) evolves, conceivably in response to the omnipresent challenge of climate change and other future crises.

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Building resilient infrastructure supply chains - Juin 2022

June 2022

Voices on Infrastructure, Mc Kinsey (41 pages).

Sommaire :

- Introduction

- News from the Global Infrastructure Initiative

- Here comes the 21st century’s first big investment wave. Is your capital strategy ready?

- Closing labor gaps to revitalize US infrastructure

- Infrastructure leaders need new capabilities to move toward net-zero emissions

- Built to last: An interview with Jennifer Lin of Trimble

- Building the net-zero workforce

- Roundtable recaps

• Washington, DC, 2022: Future-proofing our water infrastructure

• Chicago 2022: Preparing our power grids for energy transition and climate change.

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2022 Global Construction Disputes Report : Successfully navigating through turbulent times - Juin 2022

June 2022

Arcadis (28 pages).

From 2020 to 2021, the average value of disputes declined by 3% across the globe but remains at historically high levels compared to 2019 and earlier. The average time taken to resolve disputes increased significantly, by almost 15%, after steadily declining for three years.

Among regions surveyed, nearly 76% of respondents encountered disputes or claims specific to COVID-19 – a 12% increase since 2020. Similarly, 72% of respondents encountered impacts related to supply chain issues.

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Digitalisation in construction report 2022 - Mai 2022

June 2022

Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors -RICS- (29 pages).

While the pace of digitalisation across the built and natural environments continues to gather momentum, there remains a significant opportunity for the construction sector to invest more widely in adopting model-centric and data-driven work processes and practices. The benefits of digitalisation (the adoption of digital technologies, defined for the purposes of this report as BIM and digital twins) are well understood by many market participants. Still, many barriers to adoption remain across a sector that is fragmented, under continual cost and time pressures, and frequently criticised for spending less on research and development than comparable industries. In addition, to support traditional construction processes such as cost estimation, prediction, planning and control; progress monitoring; and health, safety and well-being, the sector is now having to address other practices with some urgency. These include incorporating environmental, social and governance (ESG) principles; designing and measuring social value; implementing whole-life and whole-asset thinking; and carbon footprint calculation, benchmarking and reporting across projects.

To understand the sector’s current thinking around digitalisation, four additional questions were added to the RICS Global Construction Monitor (GCM) survey, which is produced every quarter. This report analyses the global responses received during the Q4 GC 2021 survey, which closed on 20 January 2022. The results represent a snapshot of current sentiment and behaviours from a sample of the sector. RICS’ professional sentiment monitoring has been found to accurately foreshadow market movement, and the GCM is a resource to be considered alongside other sources when assessing market trends or conducting market analysis. Monitoring market sentiment around digitalisation in construction supports a level of confidence in both assessing current levels of adoption and predicting the direction of travel for the sector. By repeating these new survey questions on an annual basis, RICS will be able to demonstrate the continued pace of adoption and the nature of the continuing barriers and challenges being faced by the sector.

The results point to a globally consistent level of digitalisation. They show a current focus on the well-established needs of the sector, but also indicate growing use of digitalisation in construction around the emerging themes of ESG, social value and whole-life concepts. There is also a consistent understanding of the barriers to further adoption. While other data and technology approaches have already been applied across the sector, it is the power of building information modelling (BIM) with its higher dimensions of time (4D), cost (5D), facility management (6D), sustainability (7D) and health and safety (8D), coupled with digital twins, that has the potential to provide the most additional value over the coming years.

Much has already been achieved and implemented by many market participants. However, to address the profound impact of construction on our world, the sector must move even faster to reap the benefits of BIM and digital twins. In this digital transformation journey, RICS professionals – particularly those working in quantity surveying and construction, project management, building surveying and infrastructure pathways – can play a significant role.

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Private Participation in Infrastructure (PPI), 2021 Annual Report - Mai 2022

May 2022

Banque Mondiale (36 pages).

Our new data finds that private investment in developing-country infrastructure is rebounding from historic lows recorded in 2020. Commitments totaled $76.2 billion in 2021, a 49% increase from 2020. Although this recovery is a positive sign, daunting challenges remain. Overall commitments still lag 12% lower than the previous five-year average, an indicator that recovery from the deep recession triggered by COVID-19 is still underway.

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Reimagining engineering and project development to meet net-zero targets - Avril 2022

April 2022

Voices on Infrastructure, Mc Kinsey (34 pages).

Sommaire :

- Introduction

- News from the Global Infrastructure Initiative

- Engineering the energy transition: An interview with Aleida Rios of BP

- Capturing the net-zero opportunity with portfolio synergies

- The innovation function: An interview with Shaun Kenny of Bechtel

- Infrastructure for a net-zero economy: Transformation ahead

- How big business is taking the lead on climate change.

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International Construction Costs 2022 : The year of inflation - Avril 2022

April 2022

Arcadis (25 pages).

Construction, however, has again proved itself extremely adaptable during the last year in responding to the difficult circumstances. We have seen sustained delivery of housing and infrastructure across most global markets, better use of data, and increasing investment in technological solutions such as modern methods of construction, all of which can improve efficiencies and aid the drive to net-zero.

This adaptability will prove vital as businesses ready themselves for the uncertain and inflationary environment ahead. This theme is central to our 2022 International Construction Costs Index, which highlights dramatic price fluctuations in many regions around the globe.

While there is healthy confidence in the future of the construction sector internationally, differing government COVID-19 strategies have resulted in varying paces of recovery. Meanwhile labor and skills shortages have caused supply and demand challenges in many areas, such as Europe.

These shortages have been felt across the supply chain, forcing businesses to tackle pressing and persistent problems such as low productivity, staff retention and project resilience.

Our five-point plan later in this report provides a pragmatic guide to dealing with the unique challenges of 2022.

Sustainability is equally high on the agenda. Construction and operation of built assets is responsible for 38% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the UN Environment and International Energy Agency’s 2019 Global Status Report. COP26 also emphasized the growing need to transition away from fossil fuels, as our recent 2021 Supercharging Net Zero report details.

In the face of ongoing material shortages, efficiency and productivity remain a must. In this respect, the need for efficient design is likely to drive further investment in innovative solutions, while a big push from many governments, both in terms of financial support and the implementation of legislation, has crystalized longterm sustainability commitments.

While on the surface the looming market conditions sound unfavorable, we believe these challenges more than ever present our industry with a great opportunity to drive forward innovation. In order to reduce our impact on the environment and our reliance on resources, we need to adopt a mentality of doing more with less.

This report will give you the insight you need to navigate the current and future challenges ahead. It will show how flexible, pragmatic decision-making can allow businesses to adapt to fluctuating and unpredictable conditions and put themselves in a market-leading position to take advantage of a period of growth.

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Who we are ?

The SEFI endeavours to promote the values of French contractors in the rest of the world and ensures they can access foreign markets in undistorted competitive conditions.

The SEFI is cooperating with multiple entities, national or international, public or private, acting in the construction sector: the EIC (European International Contractors), the FIEC (European Construction Industry Federation), the CICA (Confederation of International Contractors’ Associations), the MEDEF, MEDEF International, the ICC (International Chamber of Commerce), the BIAC (Business at OECD), the AFD (Agence Française de Développement), BPIFrance, Business Europe, the European Commission, the UNECE (United-Nations Economic Commission for Europe) or the UNCITRAL (United-Nations Commission on International Trade Law)...

Members

The Syndicat des Entrepreneurs Français Internationaux (SEFI) brings together 14 members: companies and concessionaires in the construction and infrastructure sector.