Bottom-Up Infrastructure Investment

In a time of constrained public budgets, leveraging private-sector financial resources and expertise to deliver a range of infrastructure projects has growing appeal. However, these public/private partnerships (PPPs) often entail complicated contracts that differ significantly from project to project and from place to place. To address this problem, countries, states, and provinces around the world have created specialized institutional entities—called PPP units—to fulfill different functions such as quality control, policy formulation, and technical advice. The federal government should establish a dedicated PPP unit to tackle bottlenecks in the PPP process, protect the public interest, and provide technical assistance to states and other public entities that cannot develop the internal capacity necessary to deal with the projects themselves. Background The Great Recession unveiled an American economy dangerously out-of-whack, with its pronounced emphasis on consumption rather than production-oriented economic activity. During the sluggish recovery that has followed, national, state, and metropolitan leaders in the public and private sectors continue to push for investments in infrastructure to put Americans back to work and rebalance the economy. The challenge is that the nation's economic recession and tense new focus on austerity mean