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A nation’s economic development requires significant investment in infrastructure. Infrastructure investment, however, is costly and risky: it is capital-intensive, potentially unprofitable, and requires advanced technical expertise. To address this challenge, many countries have adopted the public-private partnership (PPP) model for infrastructure financing and development. This article, however, argues that this private sector-driven approach—developed in the United Kingdom in the 1990s—is not the only model gaining global traction. Asian countries such as China, Indonesia, and Vietnam have created and advanced their own model of infrastructure financing and development. Under the Asian model, state-owned enterprises (SOEs) lead infrastructure financing, construction, and operation. This article neither advocates for the British nor the Asian model. Instead, it investigates the characteristics of the Asian model and examines evidence for its dissemination. As this article demonstrates, Asia has created a new model whose characteristics include fewer but larger SOEs dominating projects—with government capital and cheap loans, in return for implementing welfare project mandates.
