Public Money for Private Infrastructure : Deciding When to Offer Guarantees, Output-based Subsidies, and Other Fiscal Support

Irwin, Timothy

Washington, DC:World Bank

关键词: GUARANTEES;    SUBSIDIES;    FISCAL SUSTAINABILITY;    FINANCING PROGRAMS;    POLITICAL RISKS;   

DOI  :  10.1596/0-8213-5556-2
RP-ID  :  26601

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

When governments seek private investmentin infrastructure projects, they usually find themselvesasked to provide grants, guarantees, or other forms offiscal support. Often they prefer to provide support in waysthat limit immediate cash expenditure but sometimes generatelarge costs later. Seeking to provide support without anyimmediate spending of cash, for example, governments oftenagree to shoulder project risks and sometimes encounterfiscal problems later. For example, in the 1970s and 1980sin Spain, the government was obliged to pay $2.7 billionwhen the exchange-rate guarantees it had given private tollroads were called (Gomez-Ibanez 1993). More recently, theIndonesian government agreed to pay $260 million as a resultof its agreements, through the electricity company it owns,to bear demand and foreign-exchange risks in private powerprojects. Yet even when governments have chosen to providecash subsidies they have not always achieved their apparentgoals: for example, over 80 percent of the Hondurangovernment's "lifeline" electricity subsidiesgo to customers who aren't poor (Wodon et al. 2003). Instill other cases, governments' decisions not toprovide support may have caused problems.