Infrastructure as an Asset Class

Barbara Weber and Mirjam Staub-Bisang wrote this as a practitioner guide for institutional investors considering infrastructure allocations, at a point when pension funds and insurers were entering the sector in volume. It covers what infrastructure investment involves, how the deals are structured, and how the returns behave.

The book treats infrastructure as spanning transport, energy, water, social facilities and communications, and distinguishes between greenfield projects, which carry construction and demand risk, and brownfield operating assets, which do not. It sets out the investment routes: listed infrastructure equities, unlisted funds, direct investment and co-investment, and public-private partnership structures. It covers project finance mechanics, including the ring-fenced special purpose vehicle, the debt structures and the contractual allocation of risk among sponsor, contractor, lender and public authority. Later material addresses sustainability and renewable energy assets.

The reference has not verified the book chapter by chapter, and this entry reflects its established scope rather than a close reading of its arguments. Readers should also note that it was written before the compression of infrastructure yields that followed the post-crisis rate environment, and before the regulatory and political interventions in European utilities and toll roads that later tested the asset class's supposed stability. Rajeev Sawant's Infrastructure Investing challenges the core claim that these assets deliver stable inflation-linked cash flows, and the two are worth reading together.