From Concessions to Project Finance and the Private Finance Initiative

Since the mid-twentieth century in the U.S. and, more recently, since the 1970s in Europe, Asia, and other developing countries, national governments increasingly have used private capital to implement infrastructure projects and to provide services previously in the scope of the public sector. They do it using several types of concessions. Following this trend, in 1992, the U.K. government announced the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), a guidance and a legal framework for concessions in the U.K. Its main objective was to encourage private capital investment into public projects. To help the reader understand why the U.K. government introduced PFI, this article examines the historic and economic background of concessions.